The males mark their territories with excretions from a gland on their chins, which they rub on the ground bordering their space. If another male intrudes on the dominant male's territory, the intruder will be attacked and chased away.
Female rabbits, called does, typically dig the warrens; in rare instances the male helps, but usually only for a few minutes at a time. Does can produce a litter approximately once every thirty days. The offspring, though born furless and blind, are on their own at the end of thirty days, when their mother must begin nursing the next litter. A phenomenon in female rabbits is the process of resorption, through which they reabsorb their embryonic litters if the area is overpopulated. The process only takes two to three days and occurs most often in subordinate does, who typically are the younger ones in a community. In the novel, the younger Efrafan female rabbits want to leave their overpopulated warren because they have been reabsorbing their young.
Richard Adams used R. M. Lockley's The Private Life of the Rabbit as his primary source for Watership Down, and several of his rabbit characters seem modeled after Lockley's examples.
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