Rabbits

Rabbits serve a double role: they are visible animals in the parkland around Wragby Wood and a comparison in a conversation about sexual freedom. The contrast is small but pointed: the human speakers debate what animal life means, while the Rabbits simply move and feed at the wood’s edge.

Actual Animals in the Wood

As Clifford Chatterley steers his chair toward the wood-gate and Connie Chatterley keeps a hand on it, Rabbits bob and nibble at the wood’s edge. Their presence belongs to a landscape marked by frost, smoke, and the enclosed feeling of the park, but the animals are described through their own simple activity rather than through any response to the couple. In the nearby wood, there are no pheasants: they had been killed during the war, and the wood had remained unprotected until Clifford obtained a gamekeeper. The Rabbits thus appear amid a landscape where animal life is present but also subject to human management and loss.

Rabbits as a Measure of Human Conduct

In a discussion of promiscuity, Hammond urges the others to be like Rabbits. When challenged, he asks what is wrong with Rabbits and contrasts them with a humanity he calls neurotic, revolutionary, and full of nervous hate. The comparison makes animal sexuality an image of instinctive conduct, set against human agitation and moral judgment. Yet the debate does not establish that people are simply equivalent to animals: another speaker insists on the difference between them, and the conversation turns to the ways hunger and sexual frustration can interfere with a person’s life and thought.

Narrative Significance

The two appearances keep the comparison from remaining purely abstract. The Rabbits invoked in conversation are also present in the physical setting, where they feed without joining the humans’ arguments or serving any apparent purpose for them. Their brief, independent activity gives the animal image a concrete counterpart, while the nearby absence of pheasants recalls that woodland life is shaped by human actions as well as by the animals themselves.