To cast animals in human roles is a form of self-centered narcissism: one looks outward

to the world and sees only one’s own reflection mirrored therein. Considered from a
moral standpoint, anthropomorphism some times seems dangerously allied to
anthropocentrism: humans project their own thoughts and feelings onto other animal
species because they egotisti cally believe themselves to be the center of the universe.
But anthropomor phism and anthropocentrism can just as easily tug in opposite
directions: for example, the Judeo-Christian tradition that humans were the pinacle of
Creation also encouraged claims that humans, being endowed by God with reason and
immortal souls, were superior to and qualtitatively different from animals.

Has the animal become, like that of the taxidermist’s craft, little more tan a human-
sculpted object in which the animal’s glass eye merely reflects our own projections? In
thinking with animals, how might we capture the agency of another being that cannot
speak to reveal the transformative effects its actions have, both literally and figuratively,
upon humans?
Emphasis on the “textual, metaphor animal,” Jonathan Burt observes, risks reducing
“the animal to a mere icon,” placing “the animal outside history.” The difficulty
becomes how to “achieve a more integrated view of the effects of the presence of the
animal and the power of its imagery in human history.”

The result of the liminal status of Watership Down in terms of its anthropomorphic tropes is
that Adams’ rabbits are depicted as neither rabbit nor human, yet both rabbit and human, at
the same time; they are neither/both. The “humanimals” p168.

I argue that, like Grahame’s novel, Watership Down is ‘more than one kind of book,’ but
extends beyond The Wind in the Willows in its amalgamation of different genres. 345
Watership Down is, we might say, more than one kind of animal narrative; the novel is
simultaneously a children’s animal story, a natural history text, and an animal epic. Robert
Miltner argues that the novel is ‘not one fine story, but simultaneously so many fine stories, so
many types of stories. To a greater or lesser degree, Watership Down is a beast fable, a
fantasy, a mythological tale, an epic, a political/Utopian novel, and an allegory’. P.166-167

Watership Down certainly possesses tropes of earlier children’s animal stories

It demonstrates ways in which animal subjects can be portrayed anthropomorphically, but

nonanthropocentrically, in a plurality of genres and modes which blur provocatively into each
other. This non-anthropocentric anthropomorphism characterizes the shift in literary
representations of nonhuman animals towards which Adams’ novel tends. P.167
Una pregunta interesante que se hace Leatherland y me puede servir para analizar el conejo
como tradición es por qué elige conejos.

why rabbits?
One answer to the question of why he chooses rabbits is that Adams is perpetuating the
literary tradition of the rabbit trickster figure.

What sort of animal story is Watership Down? The plurality of forms listed above by Miltner
transports the text beyond simply the plurality of meaning. Adams’ own remarks about the
novel in a radio interview throw its alleged status as allegory into ambiguity: ‘It’s only a made-
up story, it’s in no sense an allegory or parable or any kind of political myth.’351 For an animal
story to be purely allegorical it must, by extension, be purely anthropomorphic; in other
words, the nonhuman is not represented on its own terms but is depicted as entirely
analogous to the human.

“In many cultures the fundamental moral an prudential lessons of human life are taught
via mythis about animals, sucha as aesops fables”
Daston y Mitman.

Humans habitually use animals to think about themselves.

HUMANIMAL NARRATIVES- Leatherland, concepto interesante. Porque no son

animales ni humanos.

Constitutes neither/both structure