The jackalope is a mythical animal of North American folklore described as a jackrabbit with antelope horns. The word jackalope is a portmanteau of jackrabbit and antelope. Many jackalope taxidermy mounts, including the original, are made with deer antlers. In the 1930s, Douglas Herrick and his brother, hunters with taxidermy skills, popularized the American jackalope by grafting deer antlers onto a jackrabbit carcass and selling the combination to a local hotel in Douglas, Wyoming. Thereafter, they made and sold many similar jackalopes to a retail outlet in South Dakota, and other taxidermists continue to manufacture the horned rabbits into the 21st century. Stuffed and mounted, jackalopes are found in many bars and other places in the United States; stores catering to tourists sell jackalope postcards and other paraphernalia, and commercial entities in America and elsewhere have used the word jackalope or a jackalope logo as part of their marketing strategies. The jackalope has appeared in published stories, poems, television shows, video games, and a low-budget mockumentary film. The Wyoming Legislature has considered bills to make the jackalope the state's official mythological creature. The underlying legend of the jackalope, upon which the Wyoming taxidermists were building, may be related to similar stories in other cultures and other historical times. Researchers suggest that at least some of the tales of horned hares were inspired by sightings of rabbits infected with the Shope papilloma virus. It causes horn- and antler-like tumors to grow in various places on a rabbit's head and body. Folklorists see the jackalope as one of a group of tall tale animals, known as fearsome critters, common to North American culture since the turn of the twentieth century. These fabulous beasts appear in tall tales and lend themselves to comic hoaxes by entrepreneurs who seek attention for their own personal or the region's fortune.
Name Jackalope is a portmanteau of jackrabbit and antelope. Jackrabbits are actually hares, rather than rabbits, though both are mammals in the family Leporidae. Wyoming is home to three species of hares, all in the genus Lepus. These are the black-tailed jackrabbit, the white-tailed jackrabbit, and the snowshoe hare. The nominal antelope is not any kind of true, Old World antelope, but actually the pronghorn or American antelope (Antilocapra americana), which is more closely related to the giraffe. Some of the largest herds of wild pronghorns, which are found only in western North America, are in Wyoming. The adults grow to about 3 feet (1 m) tall, weigh up to 150 pounds (68 kg), and can run at sustained speeds approaching 60 miles per hour (97 km/h).
Origins
Stories or descriptions of animal hybrids have appeared in many cultures worldwide. A 13th-century Persian work depicts a rabbit with a single horn, like a unicorn. In Europe, the horned rabbit appeared in Medieval and Renaissance folklore in Bavaria (the wolpertinger) and elsewhere. Natural history texts such as Historiae Naturalis de Quadrupetibus Libri (The History Book of Natural Quadrupeds) by Joannes Jonstonus (John Jonston) in the 17th century and illustrations such as Animalia Qvadrvpedia et Reptilia (Terra): Plate XLVII by Joris Hoefnagel (1522–1600) in the 16th century included the horned hare. These early scientific texts described and illustrated the hybrids as though they were real creatures, but by the end of the 18th century scientists generally rejected the idea of horned hares as a biological species.
References to horned rabbits may originate in sightings of rabbits affected by the Shope papilloma virus, named for Richard E. Shope, M.D., who described it in a scientific journal in 1933. Shope initially examined wild cottontail rabbits that had been shot by hunters in Iowa and later examined wild rabbits from Kansas. They had "numerous horn-like protuberances on the skin over various parts of their bodies. The animals were referred to popularly as 'horned' or 'warty' rabbits." Legends about horned rabbits also occur in Asia and Africa as well as Europe, and researchers suspect the changes induced by the virus might underlie at least some of those tales. In Central America, mythological references to a horned rabbit creature can be found in Huichol legends. The Huichol oral tradition has passed down tales of a horned rabbit and of the deer getting horns from the rabbit. The rabbit and deer were paired, though not combined as a hybrid, as day signs in the calendar of the Mesoamerican period of the Aztecs, as twins, brothers, even the sun and moon.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
