How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
Nowadays, among fields and woods, the noise level by day is high—too high for some kinds of animal to tolerate. Few places are far from human noise—cars, buses, motorcycles, tractors, lorries. The sound of a housing estate in the morning is audible a long way off. People who record birdsong generally do it very early—before six o'clock—if they can. Soon after that, the invasion of distant noise in most woodland becomes too constant and too loud. During the last fifty years the silence of much of the country has been destroyed. But here, on Watership Down, there floated up only faint traces of the daylight noise below. (19.2)
Richard Adams takes a whole paragraph to describe how noisy and disruptive and generally annoying humans are (it's true—we're terribly noisy, so try to keep it down please), just to make the point that Watership Down is far from humans—and therefore safe from all our noisy meddling. What's curious is that humans don't build cars, motorcycles, etc. in order to be loud. The noise is just a side effect. (Like the farmer accidentally making Cowslip's rabbits weird.)
Quote #5
"[…] Toadflax answered, 'That wasn't why they destroyed the warren. It was just because we were in their way. They killed us to suit themselves.'" (21.34)
Toadflax is just a bully rabbit in Sandleford, so it's somewhat fitting that he understands humans, the ultimate bullies. (This quote from Toadflax is in Holly's story of what happened to Sandleford when the humans poisoned the warren.) We get this same idea earlier in the chapter. Other animals follow nature but people are just jerks: "Men will never rest till they've spoiled the earth and destroyed the animals" (21.5). That's British for "these guys are the living worst."
Quote #6
Rabbits (says Mr. Lockley) are like human beings in many ways. One of these is certainly their staunch ability to withstand disaster and to let the stream of their life carry them along, past reaches of terror and loss. They have a certain quality which it would not be accurate to describe as callousness or indifference. It is, rather, a blessedly circumscribed imagination and an intuitive feeling that Life is Now. A foraging wild creature, intent above all upon survival, is as strong as the grass. (22.1)
Frankly, this paragraph seems a little confused: (a) rabbits are like people—both can overcome disaster and get on with life. But (b) rabbits overcome disaster by being "wild" creatures focused on the Now. So are rabbits like people or unlike people? What's it gonna be, Mr. Adams?