Book Review: The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams

I've reviewed Watership Down, arguably Richard Adam's most popular work, but I've always been curious to one of his other stories: The Plague Dogs. I knew very little about the story going in, except that it is (again) very dark, so let's see how it goes, shall we?

The Plague Dogs follows two dogs in Britain that escape from an animal testing research facility. Rowf, a spaniel mix, and Snitter, a terrier, are both traumatized victims of the needless experiments there that took place. After their escape, they're labeled the "Plague Dogs" by the media, because they're said to carry a horrible disease with them. This causes the duo plus their new friend, a fox, to be widely hunted.

I think I'm starting to come to the conclusion that Adams' works are simply not for me. I enjoyed Watership Down okay, but nothing more than that. I gave it three stars and didn't think it should get any more or less, and I have much the same sympathies for The Plague Dogs.

The book is extremely preachy about a subject that does deserve addressing, but it often would distract from the story just to portray animal experiments as horrible and go on a rant on how we should treat our animals better. Again, mostly agreed, but it shouldn't distract from your story. It's a fictional book following two dogs first and foremost, and these constant pauses to say how experimenting on animals is the Devil himself it just distracting.

I think the book also fails to address the fact that not all experiments have to be bad. Stuff like makeup and needless vivisection and experiments for the sake of it are indeed vile and should be banned. But it is never addressed how some experiments on animals actually were beneficial and necessary in order to find cures or vaccines to various ailments. It's still not nice that it has to be tested on animals, but if it in the long run has positive effects, I believe it to be justified in some cases. This book, however, pretty much makes all experimentation seem as villainous, something I simply disagree with. I dream of the day we no longer need any animals for testing, but for now we don't always have a choice if we want to preserve more lives in the long run.

The characters of Snitter and Rowf I also couldn't get into much, something I also had with the Watership Down characters. I do care for them, but not as much as the book wants me to. I enjoyed the fox (Tod) quite a lot, but his dialogue in my Dutch translated copy has such a thick accent that he was nearly not understandable in some parts. From the snippets of his dialogue of the original English language I read, he wasn't this hard to understand at all. I can't hold it against the book as a whole, but it wasn't pleasant to be confused at a lot of his dialogue. They could've given him a less hard to understand Dutch accent. 

This book, as with Watership, is obviously not for younger readers or those that are faint of heart when it comes to animal cruelty/violence and death. I recommend you'd skip this one especially if you have trouble with that. 

Overall, I don't think I'd recommend this book to many readers. If you are curious and can stomach the cruelty, maybe go ahead, but I think Richard Adams' writing voice is simply not for me. I keep losing my concentration when reading his stories and want to put the book down more often than usual. 

Rating: 3/5