The Mostly True Tale of the Jackalope

Two Brothers and a Jackrabbit

In 1932, in the town of Douglas, Wyoming, two brothers named Douglas and Ralph Herrick came home from a hunting trip with a dead jackrabbit. They dropped it on the floor of their taxidermy shop next to a set of deer antlers they had been working on. The rabbit landed next to the antlers. Someone looked at the combination. Someone had an idea.

Douglas Herrick mounted the antlers on the rabbit. He put it in a glass case. He sold it to a local hotel for ten dollars. This was not a moment of artistic genius. It was a slow afternoon in a taxidermy shop in Wyoming, and now it is a piece of American mythology.

The Herrick brothers did not invent the idea of a horned rabbit. European folklore had described similar creatures for centuries. A German animal called the Wolpertinger included rabbit features with antlers. A Swedish creature called the Skvader was a rabbit with bird wings. But the Herrick brothers made theirs real enough to touch. Real enough to sell. Real enough that within a few decades, Douglas, Wyoming had turned itself into the Jackalope Capital of the World.

Douglas Herrick died in 2003. He is buried in Douglas, Wyoming. His obituary in the local paper noted that he was survived by family and, implicitly, by millions of postcards.

The Official Capital

Douglas, Wyoming has leaned into the Jackalope the way some towns lean into a railroad or a famous battle. Fully. Unapologetically. With merchandise.

The town holds a Jackalope license. Issued by the city. For a small fee, you can acquire a Jackalope hunting license, valid in the state of Wyoming, specifying that you may hunt Jackalopes only between midnight and 2 a.m. on June 31st. June 31st does not exist. This is not an accident.

There is a twelve-foot-tall Jackalope statue in Centennial Park. There are Jackalope belt buckles, Jackalope hats, Jackalope shot glasses, Jackalope refrigerator magnets, and at least one Jackalope-themed wedding venue. The Herrick brothers sold their first mount for ten dollars. The economic downstream of that transaction is genuinely incalculable.

In 1985, the Wyoming State Legislature officially recognized Douglas as the home of the Jackalope. This required a vote. Elected officials in Wyoming took time from governing a state to formally acknowledge a rabbit with deer antlers. Democracy in action.

Where the Science Gets Uncomfortable

Here is where the Jackalope story takes a strange turn. In the 1930s, around the same time Douglas Herrick was mounting rabbit heads, a researcher named Dr. Richard Shope was studying a disease he had found in wild cottontail rabbits in Kansas. The disease caused hard, keratinous growths to sprout from the rabbits' heads and bodies. Large ones. Pointed ones. Ones that, in certain lighting conditions, and from a certain distance, looked disturbingly like horns.

The condition is caused by the Shope papilloma virus, now called cottontail rabbit papillomavirus. It is a real thing. It affects real rabbits. Infected animals have been reported across North America for centuries, and the appearance is striking enough that people who saw them in the wild, long before the Herrick brothers, probably reported seeing a rabbit with horns and were told to stop drinking.

This is the part of the Jackalope story that no one talks about in the gift shop. The creature that Douglas Herrick invented as a joke was, in a very specific biological sense, already kind of real. The virus does not produce antlers. It produces a rough approximation of horns made of tissue, and wild rabbits infected with it can look remarkably like the mounted versions in every roadside gift shop from here to Albuquerque. The prank had a scientific footnote nobody asked for.

The Spread

Word of the Jackalope moved the way word moves in the American West: slowly and then all at once. By the 1940s, the mounted specimens were turning up in bars, hotels, and barbershops across Wyoming. By the 1950s, they were appearing in neighboring states. By the 1960s, they had their own postcard lines.

Roy Rogers owned one. Ronald Reagan reportedly had one in his office, which is either a charming detail or a concerning one depending on your politics. The Jackalope became a shorthand for Western kitsch, for the particular brand of American humor that takes a ridiculous premise and commits to it completely until the joke becomes the thing itself.

Western folklore filled in the details. The Jackalope was said to be able to mimic human voices, using this ability to confuse cowboys on night watch. It was reportedly faster than a horse. It was claimed to produce milk with mild medicinal properties, though no one has produced any. The folklore grew the way folklore does: from nothing, through repetition, into something that sounds like it might have always existed.

The Taxonomy Problem

Scientists who are asked about the Jackalope face a particular kind of problem. On one hand, it is clearly a rabbit with antlers glued to its head. On the other hand, the Shope papilloma virus creates growths in wild rabbits that have been mistaken for horns for centuries, and horned hares appear in European natural history texts going back to the 1500s.

A 16th-century naturalist named Conrad Gessner included an illustration of a horned hare in his Historiae Animalium, a serious attempt at cataloguing all known animals. Gessner was not a fool. He was working from descriptions of infected rabbits, probably, and producing the best illustration he could. The horned hare sat in European natural history alongside real animals for two centuries before anyone questioned it seriously.

The Jackalope therefore occupies a unique scientific position: it is a hoax that was independently validated by viral biology, preceded by centuries of European documentation, and officially recognized by a state legislature before anyone established whether it existed. This is not how taxonomy is supposed to work.

Still Selling

The Jackalope has outlasted every other piece of Western American novelty merchandise. The souvenir plates are gone. The painted rocks are gone. The Jackalope endures. Drive any stretch of interstate through Wyoming, Colorado, or the Dakotas and you will find one within thirty miles. Often in a gas station. Usually mounted near the register. Always with a hand-lettered sign that says something like "DO NOT FEED" or "CERTIFIED AUTHENTIC."

The Herrick family maintained commercial rights to the original Jackalope design for decades. Douglas Herrick's descendants watched a taxidermy experiment from 1932 become a cultural institution. They were proud of it. They had reason to be. It takes something genuinely strange to survive ninety years without a publicist.

The Shope papilloma virus is still out there. Wild rabbits in North America are still occasionally infected with it, still growing keratinous growths that look like horns, still being spotted by people who know they saw something they cannot explain. They tell someone. The someone laughs. The rabbit hops away. The jackalope remains, as it has always been: three parts joke, one part something else, and entirely impossible to classify.