# The jackalope, a horned rabbit of the American West, is a real living animal rather than a taxidermy invention

**Verdict: Contradicted.** The jackalope is a taxidermy novelty: a jackrabbit mount fitted with deer or antelope antlers, popularized in Douglas, Wyoming, in the early 1930s and sold ever since as a tourist curiosity. That record is not in dispute. The claim we rate is the literal one, that a horned rabbit-antelope hybrid exists as a living species of the plains. On the evidence, that claim is debunked. There is no specimen, no genetics, and no biology behind it. The genuine and fascinating loose end is that real rabbits do sometimes grow horn-like growths, caused by the Shope papillomavirus, and that centuries of European horned-hare folklore likely drew on sightings of such infected animals. That is a real phenomenon, and it is not the same as a hybrid species.

Category: Cryptids & Monsters · Era: 20th century · First circulated: The American taxidermy jackalope dates to about 1932 in Douglas, Wyoming, where brothers Douglas and Ralph Herrick mounted the first one; the older European horned-hare tradition it echoes runs back centuries to 16th-century natural-history books · Believed by: Almost no one takes the hybrid animal literally: the jackalope survives as a beloved tall tale, a roadside icon, and a running joke of the American West, with the occasional tourist gamely buying a novelty hunting license
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/jackalope

## Summary
The jackalope is the horned rabbit of American folklore: a jackrabbit crowned with the antlers of a deer or pronghorn, immortalized on postcards, barroom walls, and a 13-foot statue in Douglas, Wyoming. Its modern form is a documented taxidermy creation, first mounted around 1932 by the Herrick brothers of Douglas and manufactured by taxidermists ever since. Almost no one insists the animal is literally real, yet the legend sits atop something genuinely strange. Real rabbits do occasionally sprout horn-like keratin growths, the work of the Shope papillomavirus, described by virologist Richard Shope in the 1930s; and horned hares appear as supposedly real creatures in European natural-history texts going back to the 1500s. This case file keeps two things apart: a novelty mount, a real virus, and an old folklore tradition; and the claim it rates, that a living horned-rabbit species roams the plains. On the evidence, that claim is debunked, while the virus and the folklore are treated as the real and interesting phenomena they are.

## The claim
That the jackalope is not merely a taxidermy joke but a genuine living animal, a horned or antlered hybrid of jackrabbit and antelope inhabiting the American West, elusive and rarely captured, rather than a manufactured curiosity.

## Origin and timeline
- 1551: The horned hare, or lepus cornutus, is described as a real animal in Conrad Gessner's Historiae Animalium and is repeated in later natural-history works across the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, often reusing the same borrowed illustrations. It is now regarded as fictional.
- 1930s: Virologist Richard E. Shope investigates reports of wild cottontail rabbits with horn-like growths and shows the growths are keratin tumors caused by a transmissible virus, later named the Shope papillomavirus. His work becomes the first mammalian model of a virus that causes cancer.
- 1932: In Douglas, Wyoming, brothers Douglas and Ralph Herrick, who had studied taxidermy by mail order, mount a jackrabbit carcass fitted with deer antlers. By family account, the carcass had come to rest beside a pair of antlers in their shop, suggesting the combination.
- 1930s: The Herricks sell that first mount, reportedly for ten dollars, to Roy Ball, who displays it at the La Bonte Hotel in Douglas. The oddity becomes a local talking point, and the brothers and other taxidermists begin producing horned rabbits for sale.
- 1940s: The jackalope spreads through the West on postcards, in curio shops, and above bars, accumulating tall tales: that it sings, that it mimics human voices, that it can only be caught with whiskey as bait. Douglas brands itself the jackalope's home town.
- 2003: Douglas Herrick dies at 82. Obituaries, including one in The New York Times, credit him and his brother with originating the American jackalope, cementing the object's documented human history.
- 2005: The Wyoming House of Representatives votes to name the jackalope the state's official mythological creature; the measure stalls in the Senate. Similar bills are reintroduced in later years, a running civic tradition around the legend.
- 2022: Writer Michael P. Branch publishes On the Trail of the Jackalope, tracing the legend and connecting it to the real Shope-virus rabbits whose study helped lay groundwork for the human papillomavirus vaccine.
- 2025: Sightings of wild rabbits with horn-like growths in Colorado draw national coverage. Scientists identify the cause as the Shope papillomavirus and note there is no cause for panic, a modern reminder of the biology behind the old horned-hare stories.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: The jackalope is a genuine living species, a hybrid of jackrabbit and antelope.
  Evidence: There is no such animal. Rabbits and antelope are not remotely close enough to interbreed, and no live jackalope, carcass, skeleton, or tissue sample has ever been produced. Every physical jackalope is a taxidermy assembly. The modern American version has a documented human origin in Douglas, Wyoming, around 1932, credited to the Herrick brothers.
- Claim: People have really seen horned rabbits in the wild, which proves the creature exists.
  Evidence: Sightings of horned rabbits are real, but they are not of a hybrid species. They are ordinary rabbits infected with the Shope papillomavirus, which triggers keratin growths, sometimes horn or antler shaped, on the head and body. Those growths are tumors of the animal's own skin, not the antlers of a separate creature. The virus explains the sightings without any need for a new species.
- Claim: Old scientific books documented the horned hare, so at one time it was accepted as real.
  Evidence: It was, and that is a lesson in how error propagates rather than proof of the animal. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century naturalists such as Gessner listed the lepus cornutus and copied one another's illustrations, and hoaxers supplied mounts by grafting small antlers or horns onto stuffed hares. As biology matured, the horned hare was dropped from the catalogue of real animals. Its appearance in old books reflects the credulity of early natural history, not a lost species.
- Claim: You can buy a jackalope hunting license in Douglas, so the hunt must be real.
  Evidence: The licenses are a novelty, and their own fine print gives away the joke. The official jackalope hunting season is a single day that does not exist on the calendar, June 31, with hunting permitted only in the small hours of the morning. The town issues the tags as tourist whimsy; they are a civic in-joke, not evidence of a huntable animal.
- Claim: The antlers on a jackalope look natural, so they must grow on the animal.
  Evidence: On a taxidermy mount, the antlers are simply attached deer or pronghorn hardware fitted to a jackrabbit skin, which is why they look convincingly deerlike: they are deer antlers. On a real virus-infected rabbit, the growths are keratin, the same material as fingernails and hair, not the bone of a true antler. Neither case involves antlers native to a rabbit.

## Why people believe it
- The jackalope is a masterpiece of tall-tale Americana. It was never really meant to be believed so much as enjoyed, and a good taxidermy mount is convincing enough to reward the willing suspension of disbelief that a joke this fond invites.
- There is a kernel of biological truth underneath it. Real rabbits really do grow horn-like protrusions from the Shope virus, so anyone who has seen or heard of an infected animal has genuine grounds to think horned rabbits are, in some sense, a real thing.
- The legend is centuries deep. Horned hares appear in European folklore and in the pages of early naturalists, so the American jackalope arrived pre-loaded with an old and widespread tradition rather than as a one-off gag.
- Towns and businesses actively cultivate it. Douglas, Wyoming, built statues, issued hunting licenses, and lobbied its legislature over the jackalope, and curio shops across the West sell the mounts, all of which keeps the creature vivid and everywhere.
- It scratches a pleasant itch. The idea of a shy, antlered rabbit that sings like a cowboy and dodges hunters is charming enough that people are happy to half-believe, precisely because the belief costs nothing and the story is delightful.

## Open questions
- How much of the centuries-old European horned-hare tradition was inspired by real Shope-virus rabbits, and how much was pure invention or copied illustration, cannot be cleanly separated at this distance.
- The precise first date and details of the Herrick mount rest largely on family recollection and later obituaries, so the founding story, while well attested, carries the ordinary fuzziness of oral history.
- Whether informal horned-rabbit mounts circulated in the American West before the Herricks, given the older European wolpertinger and horned-hare traditions, is hard to establish, since novelty taxidermy rarely leaves records.

## Sources
- The Legend of the Jackalope, City of Douglas, Wyoming (official website) (2024): https://www.cityofdouglas.org/255/The-Legend-of-the-Jackalope
- The World's Scariest Rabbit, Smithsonian Institution (2022): https://www.si.edu/stories/worlds-scariest-rabbit
- On the Trail of the Jackalope, The Scientist (2022): https://www.the-scientist.com/on-the-trail-of-the-jackalope-69653
- Tall Tales and Other Oddities: The Fabulous Jackalope of Wyoming, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming (2025): https://ahcwyo.org/2025/03/03/tall-tales-and-other-oddities-the-fabulous-jackalope-of-wyoming/
- Rabbits are sprouting virus-induced "horns" in Colorado. Here's why scientists say there's no reason to panic., CBS News (2025): https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rabbits-horns-colorado-shope-papillomavirus/
- Book Review: On The Trail Of The Jackalope: How A Legend Captured The World's Imagination And Helped Us Cure Cancer, Forbes (2022): https://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccacoffey/2022/04/10/book-review-on-the-trail-of-the-jackalope-how-a-legend-captured-the-worlds-imagination-and-helped-us-cure-cancer/
- The HPV Vaccine Story, National Library of Medicine (PMC) (2019): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7089001/
- Lepus cornutus, Wikipedia (2025): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepus_cornutus

Rated by The Conspiratory, a neutral, sourced encyclopedia of conspiracy theories. Full page: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/jackalope