More about the Jackalope

Season 2, Episode 4: The Jackalopes

The jackalope is a fearsome critter of North America.  It's a jack rabbit with antlers.

Stories about horned rabbits have cropped up across the world, but the American variant traces its roots back to Douglas Herrick. Herrick was a hunter and taxidermist, and in 1932, he put together the first taxidermized jackalope by stitching antlers onto a rabbit. That first jackalope was displayed in the La Bonte Hotel in Douglas, Wyoming, where it became a big tourist attraction. Other taxidermized jackalopes followed to the point where many people thought (and still think) that they must be real.

While most stories about monsters come from a place of trying to explain the unknown and giving yourself a little scare when you think, “well, it might be true,” stories about jackalopes are more tongue-in-cheek with both the teller and the listener knowing it doesn’t exist. Stores in Wyoming sell jackalope milk, but the New York Times notes that that’s ridiculous, because milking a jackalope is too dangerous for a sustainable business. They only breed during lightning storms, and even though the rabbit part would lead you to believe that they multiply, the antler part of them makes the process difficult, thus their scarcity. You can lure out a jackalope with whiskey, its beverage of choice.

Jackalopes can imitate human speech and learned to sing from cowboys around camp fires. They use this skill to avoid capture by leading hunters off track, shouting, “Over here!” and “Not that way!” and “Help! Help!” in the voices of the hunter’s buddies.