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Concept
The Plague Dogs
Summary
The Plague Dogs is a novel by English author Richard Adams, first published in 1977 by Allen Lane. The book centres around the friendship of two dogs that escape an animal testing facility and are subsequently pursued by both the government and the media. As in Adams' debut novel, Watership Down (1972), the animal characters in The Plague Dogs are anthropomorphised.
The Plague Dogs features location maps drawn by Alfred Wainwright, a fellwalker and author. The conclusion of the book involves two real-life characters, Adams' long-time friend Ronald Lockley, and the world-famous naturalist Sir Peter Scott. Having seen a manuscript, both men readily agreed to be identified with the characters and opinions that Adams had attributed to them, as is shown in Adams' preface to the book.
In 1982, The Plague Dogs was adapted into an animated feature film of the same name.
This book tells of the escape of two dogs, Rowf and Snitter, from a government research station in the Lake District in England, where they had been horribly mistreated. They live on their own with help from a red fox, or "tod", who speaks to them in a Geordie dialect. After the starving dogs attack some sheep on the fells, they are reported as ferocious man-eating monsters by an opportunistic journalist. A great dog hunt follows, which is later intensified with the fear that the dogs could be carriers of a dangerous bioweapon, such as the bubonic plague.
Adams stated in the book's introduction that "There is no such place in the Lake District as Animal Research (Scientific and Experimental). In reality, no single testing or experimental station would cover so wide a range of work as Animal Research. However, every 'experiment' described is one which has actually been carried out on animals somewhere."
The actual location of "ARSE" (an acronym for Animal Research, Scientific and Experimental, and British slang for buttocks) was based on the remote hill farm of Lawson Park, now run as an artist residence by the contemporary art organisation Grizedale Arts.
Official source
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