Plague Dogs

Plague Dogs is, like Watership Down, an animated film based on a book by Richard Adams. Also like Watership Down it takes a pro-animal stance, in this case, against animal testing and confinement.

This story focuses on two dogs at a testing lab--Snitter (voiced by John Hurt), a fox terrier who has had some sort of brain surgery, and Rowf (Christopher Benjamin), a labrador who has been drowned several times to test his fear reactions, to the point that he fears the water now. One night one of their cages is accidentally left open and the two dogs escape from the facility, which is located in a remote hilly area of England. They traverse the countryside as Snitter tries to convince Rowf that they need to find a “master” who will care for them. They cross paths with “the tod,” a crafty fox (James Bolam) who alternately tries to trick them or help them. They run across several possibilities of a master but time and again it is a failure, whether due to cruel humans, marauding animals, or the hardships of travelling cross country. The story sometimes shows us news stories or discussions by human characters who voice concern about the escaped animals and the fear that they might carry the bubonic plague, which was being tested at the facility Snitter and Rowf escaped from.


The movie ends with, I think, an ambiguous scene where you are not sure if Snitter and Rowf suffer death or find an island away from humans where they can live freely.

The movie does a good job of weaving the human and animal characters while leaving the animals still a bit remotely in their own world. Humans are portrayed as secondary characters in the animals’ stories. I don’t think the humans are seen in any particularly good light as the balance of good versus bad is squarely on the bad side, at least from the animals’ points of view, especially in the way the lab testers talk about the animals in a completely remote way. John Hurt gives Snitter some character, as well as James Bolam as the tod. But overall I think these three main animal characters are depicted too anthropomorphically and use dialogue that humans would use. The tod, especially, personifies all the traits we humans think foxes have--sly, crafty, trickster. I think I liked better how the rabbits in Watership Down had their own words and mythology which helped to create a world that was new to us.

I did like that the story ends ambiguously and not a sure-fire feel-good ending, but I am of the cynical opinion that they didn’t survive.  This is a mature story to get you think about these issues and certainly not a typical feel-good animal story.