Jackalope
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Overview
A jackalope combines a rabbitlike body with antlers, making a familiar animal strange with one conspicuous addition. Tales can elaborate its speed, its voice or its peculiar preferences, often inviting the listener to decide how far to join the joke. Mounted specimens are constructed taxidermy objects rather than ordinary zoological preparations.
Douglas publicly embraces the creature through signs, celebrations and deliberately extravagant local lore. Its official account also describes the modern business of combining rabbit bodies and antlers. Reading those two registers together shows how tall tales work: the fabricated creature acquires a real cultural life, even while its claimed biology remains part of an invitation to playful disbelief.
Origins & earliest records
Douglas traces a local taxidermy business to the 1930s. Horned-hare images elsewhere have separate histories, so that account establishes a particular modern tradition rather than every possible antlered-rabbit image. A surviving record dates its documentation, not the beginning of an oral tradition; earlier transmission cannot be timed precisely from this witness alone.
Records & interpretation
The city’s account, mounted objects and civic uses are direct evidence of folklore manufacture and reception. Their authenticity as objects does not make the composite mount evidence of a living antlered rabbit. This is evidence for cultural expression and recorded interpretation, rather than a zoological specimen or independently verified supernatural event.
Selected bibliography
Documented works and useful reading. This is not a list of every appearance.
- 01
Meet Jack
Selected primary witness; not an exhaustive bibliography.
Family & connections
A source-supported family tree or inspiration record has not yet been compiled for this profile. Related reading below indicates a connection in subject matter, not a proven lineage or creative influence.
Encyclopedia background
An additional attributed reference, separate from the editorial profile above.
Read the open encyclopedia overview
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.
Text from Wikipedia contributors, “Jackalope”. CC BY-SA 4.0. Extracted introduction; formatting changed. Retrieved 5 October 2026. The source article may have changed since retrieval.
References
Sources supporting this profile. Linked pages have their own scope and editorial standards.
- Primary textMeet JackResearch access: 2026-10-05
Image credits
Reference illustrationJackalope
Image associated with the exact linked encyclopedia article; consult credited file description for its interpretation.
