The jackalope, just like its hairy cousin Bigfoot, has become something of an American
institution.
Your local farmer might claim to have spotted jackalopes in his fields from time to time.
Your classmate probably warned you that jackalopes are vicious if provoked.
Here's the truth about jackalopes.
Believe it or not, the widespread belief in hares with horns goes back to the days before
the USA was the USA.
The first known document showing something like a jackalope is a Persian geographic dictionary
from the 1200s depicted a rabbit with a single, unicorn-esque spike on its head.
The the rather fearsome, fanged Bavarian "Wolpertinger" painting dates to 1509, and in later centuries,
horned rabbits began appearing in all sorts of European tomes.
And then there's the legends from Central America.
According to People of the Peyote: Huichol Indian History, Religion, and Survival, one
of the iconic heroes of ancient Huichol culture was Kauyumari, a deity sometimes called the
Blue Deer, who was said to have first received his antlers as a gift from his friend, the
rabbit.
Those are legends, but for centuries people believed horned rabbits were real.
They even had a scientific name: Lepus cornutus.
In 1673, for instance, legendary British naturalist John Ray described seeing both "the head of
a horned hare" and also "the horns of a hare" among an assortment of other, regular animal
body part specimens.
By the end of the 1700's, though, scientists had decided that jackalopes weren't, in fact
real.
"Zoinks!
A jackalope?!
I thought those things were fake!"
So then where does the American jackalope come from?
It's pretty simple: two dudes made one as a joke.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Wyoming brothers Douglas and Ralph Herrick returned
from a hunting trip with a jackrabbit carcass.
It ended up next to a set of deer antlers in their taxidermy studio.
Douglas immediately hit on the idea of combining the two, and in 1934, they sold their first
mounted jackalope head to a hotel in the town of Douglas, Wyoming, for ten bucks.
It was a hit, and after word quickly spread about the jackalope, the brothers launched
a new business making and selling jackalopes.
Once jackalope heads began sprouting up around Douglas, tall tales about jackalopes quickly
followed, and continue to this day.
For instance, cowboys in the Wild West supposedly gathered around the fire at night, sang old
songs, and often heard the jackalopes singing back to them in astonishingly human voices.
Oh yeah.
Snake oil salesmen claimed that the milk of a jackalope was a potent aphrodisiac - horny
rabbit, get it? - while other hoaxsters said that the best way to catch one of these beasties
was to use whiskey as bait because the rabbits loved getting drunk on it.
Naturally, salesmen often told their customers to avoid the so-called "warrior rabbit" in
the wild, since jackalopes were very aggressive when provoked.
And according to the Billings Gazette, some bizarre jackalope stories are even real, such
as an instance where British authorities confiscated a jackalope head found in an American woman's
luggage because it was presumed to belong to a protected species.
The fact that anybody still believes in jackalopes in the present day is a testament to how the
town of Douglas, Wyoming has spent almost a century spreading one of the USA's most
lucrative hoaxes, mostly by marketing the fabled beast like crazy.
The self-proclaimed jackalope capital of the world, Douglas boasts the world's largest
jackalope sculptures, which is a very specific distinction.
The Douglas Chamber of Commerce also offers tourists official jackalope hunting licenses,
though the specified hunting season lasts just a single day each year.
The state has gotten into it too.
The very name jackalope - which, if you hadn't noticed, is a very on-the-nose portmanteau
of jackrabbit and antelope - was trademarked by the state of Wyoming in 1965.
And in 1985, Wyoming governor Ed Herschler officially designated Wyoming as the jackalope's
stomping grounds.
There's also been a long battle in the Wyoming state legislature to ratify the jackalope
as the state's "official mythical critter," but while that seems harmless enough, this
is politics, which is why the bill has been defeated several times since 2005.
But hey, at least the Wyoming state lottery adopted a jackalope mascot named YoLo, so
that's… something?
Are jackalopes real?
In a manner of speaking ... yes, actually.
Wait, hold onto your horns.
Bizarrely enough, there truly are rabbits out there who have hornlike growths sprouting
from their heads, and it's quite possible that these unusual bunnies inspired some of
the myths.
The sad news, though, is that these growths aren't antlers, true horns, or anything nice
or fun or fantastical like that: They're tumors, which are the result of the cancer-causing
Shope papillomavirus.
Sound familiar?
That's because when this virus infects humans, it's called HPV.
In humans, HPV causes cancerous tumors to appear in the cervix, but when it hits rabbits,
the tumors manifest as hard growths from the skull.
The disease eventually kills them, so these horns are not harmless appendages but a terrible
progression of their illness.
Though most people haven't heard of this, the scientific community has known about it
for years thanks to researchers from Rockefeller University.
In the 1930s, scientist Richard Shope heard about jackalopes on a hunting trip, and decided
to use science to prove they were real.
After having a friend catch a real horned rabbit, Shope experimented on other live rabbits,
eventually proving that the horns were tumors caused by cancer.
It was gruesome work, but there is sort of a happy ending: colleague Francis Peyton Rous
used that research to help prove his theory that cancer can be caused by viruses, work
which earned him the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1966.
Thank you, jackalopes!
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