331: Jackrabbits

Hi there everybody, it's Ellen Weatherford. And Christian Weatherford. And this is just the zoo of us, your favorite animal review podcast where we rate your favorite animals out of 10 in the categories of effectiveness, ingenuity and aesthetics. We are not zoological experts, but we try our best to bring the best and most accurate information that we can. And we have a couple of things to shout out real quick. First of all, thank you so much to everybody who came out to Nerd Night a couple weeks ago. I got to talk to some really, really cool people who stopped in to hear my talk on the Zoology of Dragons, which was a great time. Thank you so much to the listeners of the show who came to see that. I really enjoyed getting to meet you guys. There will be more Nerd Nights in the future, so go check those out if you want to have a fun time learning new cool stuff in Seattle. Also we are having a tide pooling meetup in a couple weeks here on April 18th that has been mostly organized actually by people in our discord. Details about that will be on our social media, so make sure you go check out our Instagram and stuff like that for details. If you happen to live in the Seattle area and want to come tide pooling with us, the springtime is a really nice time to go tide pooling because like the weather is getting like really nice starting to be like nice and sunny and warm and I'm really excited about that. As part of the Maxfun drive, there will also be a meetup day. Also Scout from our discord has helped out with scheduling a Seattle meetup for Maxfun drive that is on Thursday, April 23rd. There will be a Seattle meetup which I am very much looking forward to being at. It will be at Mox in Ballard and it's going to be a really fun time. I believe it's Maxfun.org for more details on meetup day. Have you been to that location before? Not to the Ballard one but we, you and I have been to the Bellevue Mox and it's so much fun. Oh my gosh, if you live in Seattle or near Seattle, you gotta go to Mox, it's so fun. It's like a board game, restaurant, store, bar, all sort of, it's really really fun. So yeah, that's what I wanted to let people know about is those two things with a tide pooling meetup in a Maxfun drive meetup day. How's your, are you recovering from the attempt I just made on your life a few minutes ago? Yep, still smelling that coconut. We have chili cooking in the house. I see, like, I wish we could communicate the background smells in our house right now because we're cooking chili in the slow cooker right now. It's our whole house smells like chili which smells delicious. So I thought that was what you were smelling. You came into the office to record and you said you smelled something that smelled kind of like perfume. I have just put on coconut and pear flavored chapstick. So I was like, oh, is it this? And I went to go hold it up to you to smell it and see if it was the smell you were smelling. But I didn't realize you were also leaning in at the same time. And I'm pretty sure I shoved the chapstick into your nose. Did it get any nostril in there? I think so, yeah. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to. It's okay, there's worse things to be stabbed by. But you know what? I bet your nose smells really good. At least it's a pleasant smell to get stuck in your nose. You've heard of songs getting stuck in your head. Now get ready for a smell stuck in your nose. That is the smell equivalent of being blindfolded. That's true. Sometimes that's what you want. I've heard of that. I've heard of people putting like a little like when you're hiking in the forest and you find some like pine sap or something. You can put a little bit of pine sap just like on your upper lip and it makes kind of like a like it's like an air freshener that you carry around with you. So there you go. Sorry about that. Oh good. This week I have an animal to talk about. Do you want to try to guess what it is? You want to play metazooa to try to figure out what it is? I don't. We've been really into metazooa over on our Discord for anyone who is aware of that. It's like an online it's kind of like taxonomy wordle. It's where like you put in a guess for an animal and it gives you how closely related your guess is to the target animal. I've gotten good at it. My score is getting better. Oh, I'm getting better at it. I did it once. How did that go? Okay, that's all I've done. I don't even keep up with the regular wordle. I know you're not like a daily puzzle game person. No, if I'm doing something daily, something is wrong. Like that mobile game I was playing. You say that and yet how long is your dual lingo streak right now? 800 something. 800? That's crazy. That's years. Yeah, I feel bad. I feel like I don't have enough to show for it. You're really treating it like a mobile game at this point. I had to decide how to categorize it in budgeting. Like this education or entertainment. You pay for dual lingo? Yeah. Oh, that's right. You did start because you wanted your streak freeze. Yeah, that's how they get you. And yet like for how dedicated you are to it, you don't seem to enjoy it at all. Because every time you remember that you have to do it at 11.58 p.m. every night, you're always like devastated. You're like... I missed it by 30 seconds last night. I don't have to do it today. Oh, there you go. Hit, hit. How did I get on talking about that? I don't remember how we started talking about that. Okay, so I do actually have an animal to talk about this. This week, I will be talking about Jack Rabbits. Okay. This felt a little timely to me because we just had Easter, right? Rabbits and hairs are strongly associated with Easter. For some reason. Well, why don't you ask me about that in like 45 minutes? I will tell you, I do have notes on it actually. So yeah, Jack Rabbits, these were submitted by a listener named B via email. My works cited will be in the episode description. So you can go check out all the sources where I got my information from. Now, we have done an episode on Rabbits. This was episode... Was it me? No, it wasn't you. Really? I thought I remember looking into how their digestive system works. You did a different type of legeomorph called the pika. Oh, that's what it was. They do something... They have that weird poop stuff going on. But we did have an episode on Rabbits with Zoe Fegan, who's a veterinarian in Australia who talks about Rabbits with us in episode 290. But in that episode, we were focusing more on Rabbits. Jack Rabbits are hairs. What does that mean? Did you know that they're different? No. Rabbits and hairs are different. I kind of assumed these were all just regional synonyms. It is a little bit regional. Jack Rabbits are basically certain types of hairs that mostly live in Central and Western North America. So from Canada down to Mexico, there are certain types of hairs that we call Jack Rabbits. So there's five or six different species. Now, as hairs, they tend to be a good bit larger than Rabbits. They're about two feet long, or 60 centimeters, and between three to six pounds, which is one and a half to three kilograms. So they're a good bit bigger than a rabbit. Also, you can kind of tell by the way that they are. They're longer. Like they tend to have longer limbs. They have much bigger ears than Rabbits. They tend to be leaner. Would you naturally see a hair and a rabbit next to each other side by side? You could. You very much could. So like in the Southwest, they have things like a desert cotton tail, which is a rabbit and Jack Rabbits and other types of hair, like desert hairs. So you would actually see overlap between hairs and rabbits. Are they mortal enemies? Are they indifferent? You're more than welcome to headcanon that. Enemies to lovers. They can't interbreed, though. They can't like hybridize. They're distantly related enough that they could not interbreed. Jack Rabbits belong to the genus Lepus, L-E-P-U-S, which is in the family of Le Porre des, which they share with their cousins, the rabbits. Hairs, I think, kind of look like a second stage Pokemon evolution of rabbits. Like rabbits look like the cute, rounded, bubbly looking little baby Pokemon. And then hairs kind of look like that second stage evolution where they're like a little more serious. I think I saw someone describe it also that hairs have that like manic, fay wild energy about them. They're deeply haunted. Yeah. They do have like a haunted energy to them. They look very like gaunt. And I think a lot of that is to do with their eyes. So in like rabbits, they typically have these eyes that appear to be all like dark or like they look kind of just like black, beady eyes, which looks a little bit more, I think, cartoonish. Yes. But with hairs, they have this like bright yellow iris around the pupil. Right. And so it looks more like...herod. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They do look very manic. They do look very frazzled. They also act that way and behave that way. Yeah. They do just seem like a haunted rabbit sort of, like a rabbit with a curse on it. There are a lot of Tumblr posts out there that are like, you can tell a rabbit from a hair because a hair looks like it met God. Oh, yeah. Like the hair has been through some stuff. So this is also timely because of our Dungeons & Dragons game. How so? Just because the rabbits and the fay kind of theme to it. Maybe you can speak on that a little bit more. I don't know very much about the...what are they called? Herringon. Yeah, it's the playable species in D&D. Or you're like a rabbit humanoid. This is for like your player character. Yes, or in PCs. True, true. We do have a Herringon player in our party actually. Yes. We've been playing D&D with some of our friends and one of my friends is playing as a Herringon right now named Chard. Yeah. You'll never guess, but like we have sort of an animal theme among our group. Mmm. If anyone's curious about our D&D shenanigans, you can ask me off the pod. Mmm. I promise I'll be happy to share. It's just, I like to stay focused and on task on this show. Did you say yappy to share? I didn't, but I might as well have. That sounds like you were filling in that blank on your own. Okay, so just to zoom out a little bit more on, I mentioned this word earlier, legeomorphs. So, hairs, rabbits and pycas make up the order of legeomorphs, which is actually distinct from rodents. A lot of people think that rabbits and hairs are rodents. They're not, they're different. And you can tell them apart by an extra, the legeomorphs have an extra set of incisors that rodents do not have. So, rabbits and hairs and pycas have four sets of incisors, rodents only have two. Okay. Yeah. So, those are the only three legeomorphs? Yes, those are the only three sort of groups of legeomorphs. Pycas are more distantly related. And then you've got the rabbits and hairs that are the leporids. Pycas are really cute also. They're adorable. They definitely, you can tell that they're rabbit adjacent, you know, but not quite the same. So, if this is anyone's first time listening to this podcast, what we do is rate animals out of 10 in different categories. And the first one is effectiveness, physical adaptations, things built into the animal's body that let it do a good job of the things that it's trying to do. I'm giving Jackrabbit a 10 out of 10 for effectiveness. You can really tell that they're specialized in these wide open grasslands. They're, Zoe Fegan actually used the word grassland specialist, which I think is like, you can really tell that they're made for these just wide open plains. They are meant to go and they are meant to go fast. Yeah. These are zoomers. They are, they are going. And there are a lot of really interesting sort of adaptations to their body that let them take advantage of these wide open plains and these sort of arid areas of North America. Hairs in general, way more so than rabbits. Rabbits are pretty quick. Have you ever tried to catch a rabbit? No. You should try it. It's hard. Okay. They're fast. Look from a distance. I know. I appreciate. I know, but I've had to, I had to catch one at the pet store one time. Oh, okay. I see. But hairs are like even more so. They are like, hairs are like the Ferrari of small mammals, basically. They are meant to zoom as quickly as they possibly can. They have these really long legs that kind of make them look like deer almost. Like they look very deer like. They're very lean. They're not as fluffy as rabbits. They're a lot more aerodynamic and they can reach speeds of up to 45 miles per hour or 72 kilometers per hour. So this is about 33 body lengths per second. Do you remember us talking about body lengths per second before? Yeah, like in the context of bugs and things. Yeah. Yeah. We usually talk about it with bugs because when you're, when you're talking about a bug and you're like, this bug can go like five miles per hour. You're like, that's not that much. That's not very fast at all. I was like, okay, but they're like half an inch long. Like that's, it becomes more impressive when you put it into scale of like how big the animal is. Do you happen to remember the body lengths per second of a cheetah? Hmm. Famously fastest running mammal. Body lengths per second? Yes. Probably between five and 10. It's actually 20 for the cheetah. Really? Yeah. So cheetah, cheetah is very fast at 20. Now keep in mind for the jackrabbits, 33 body lengths per second. Okay. So pound for pound, like to scale. Jackrabbits are faster than cheetahs. Yeah. And that's not surprising. They're the fastest. I want to say they're the fastest mammal for their size. Sure. Do you happen to know what the human body lengths per second are? Now, is this head to toe body length or chest to back body length? See, I think it is head to toe body length. Okay. Let's see, cheetah was at 20. Which I think is unfair for it to be head to toe body length because that's not the axis we're traveling on, right? It would be really funny if they did like a toe to heel body length, right? Like, where would you, if you were trying to measure the dimension horizontally of a human, where would you measure it from? Probably sternum to spine. That's not very far at all. Okay. Human body lengths per second. Yeah. So if a cheetah is at 20, I'm going to guess 12 for humans. The fastest human ever recorded Usain Bolt had 6.4 body lengths per second. Oh, dang it. I'm really bad at guessing this. That's why I ask you to guess. Because it's more fun when you get them wrong. Oh, okay. Yeah. So even the fastest human ever recorded was only topping out at 6.4 body lengths per second. Compare it once again with a jackrabbit at 33. Now, I don't know this for sure, but isn't Usain Bolt pretty tall? Yeah, probably. That's, this is messed up. Well, I mean, really, that would be dragging his like body lengths per second down, right? Yeah. I mean, you're not going to get better than that. I don't think. This is mega-farm of propaganda. Well, really, it comparatively makes the smaller animals look way better. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. Something that I thought was interesting, which I actually remembered from the conversation with Zoe Fiegen, is that even the shape of their skull is adapted specifically to going very fast in a way that I think most others are not. I haven't heard of any other animal having this type of adaptation, and it has to do with their facial tilt. So among the lego morphs, there is a very strong correlation between how fast the animal runs and how steeply their snout points down. So if you imagine that they're looking straight along the horizon, right? Sure. The angle of their snout is steeper the faster that they go. So if they go really slowly, like imagine a pika, their snout kind of points out along the plane of vision, basically. Oh, okay. So when you look at rabbits, theirs are pointed down maybe like 45 degrees. But when you look at hairs and jackrabbits, especially, theirs nose is sloped. I mean, it's like a sheer face. I see. It points nearly straight down, like a very, very steeply sloped face. Do you have any guesses as to why that might be? Like why those two things might be related? Probably vision related, right? Yeah. You have to see what's on the ground. Yeah, because like if you're running, you need to see what you're running into, right? Like you need to be scanning the ground so you can see. But also seeing where you're going, like in the more distant, like more distance. Yeah. So the idea is that the nose is steeply sloped to be out of the way of the eyes. Yeah. Like they need to get their nose out of the way so that they can run fast. But I can't think of any other animal that's shaped like that. Because usually when I think of like animals that are meant to go fast, I think of them being very streamlined, right? Like aerodynamically streamlined. No, are their eyes more centered on the front of the face than side face? No, they're to the side. They have a nice wide sort of field of view. There's a popular like idea that animals with front facing eyes are predators and animals with side facing eyes are prey. That is like often true, but it's not a rule. I want to do away with that idea because there are a lot of like examples either way. It's just not all, it doesn't always work that way. There are a lot of like primates who are not predators who have forward facing eyes, right? And there are like birds of prey have side facing eyes. Like it's just not as cut and dry as that. Yeah, never is is it? No. I mean like birds and things, I guess the thing with them is their beaks are normally more narrow than a snout. That's true, yeah. So they wouldn't necessarily have to have much to get out of the way. Yeah. Yeah, I just thought it was interesting like the shape of the skull being adapted to being able to still see so that you can run really fast without tripping. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Makes sense because like the faster they go, the more... The more it's going to hurt if you run into something. Now, I was thinking about, because I was reading about this, you know, these are animals that live in either grasslands or deserts or something in central and western North America. And something that I remembered from a long time because I'm looking at them like these animals are so, so, so fast. They are incredibly fast. They are like orders of magnitude faster than like most other things that live there. Especially like the larger predators that would be probably chasing them on the ground. And it reminded me a lot of the pronghorn. You've seen pronghorns before. You saw pronghorns kind of by accident, didn't you? I mean just a small glance while driving. That's more than I've seen while I've seen them in a zoo. But you saw them in the wild, which I think is really, really cool. Yeah. So with those that they were adapted to a predator that's no longer here. Right. That's where I'm going with this. Okay. Yeah. So the idea is that the pronghorn is the second fastest runner in the world. Incredibly fast. Way, way, way faster than any predator in North America. Like the idea is like why would they be that fast if there's nothing else that could come even close. Like usually with animals they get to those high speeds because there's selective pressure making them faster and faster and faster. Like an evolutionary arms race with a predator. Like the predator is getting faster and faster. So the prey species has to get faster and faster to escape them. So that's how you get the pronghorn, which evolved in North America where there used to be a cheetah. We used to have a North American cheetah. It went extinct. I want to say in the Ice Age. It was called Myrosinonix, which I think more recent research has suggested that they might not have actually been as the word is cursorial as in like a running chasing predator. They might have been a little bit more like a mountain lion or a little bit more like a Puma or something like that. But they were closely related to cheetahs. And the idea is that in North America, we used to have this cheetah that was a very, very fast running predator. And the pronghorn had to get faster and faster to escape the cheetah. Cheetah goes extinct. Pronghorn is now promoted to fastest animal. But now there's no predator that can run even nearly as fast as them. So they're just running that fast for no reason now. So I was wondering if maybe the jackrabbit had some sort of similar. I don't know about that. That's purely me noodling around. But I was wondering if maybe jackrabbits had like an ancient pressure to run faster and faster to get a way. Perhaps a bird of prey that's no longer around. They do get grieved by birds of prey on the regular like all the time. They do absolutely have to run from birds of prey. And birds of prey can be very, very fast, especially if they're diving. So it makes sense that they are still fast. I was just wondering if maybe the cheetah put some pressure on them to go faster and faster. Well, the presence of cars put pressure on animals to be faster. Or is really the bottleneck there just recognition that the car is a danger? I think that first of all, cars have not been around long enough to like actually be exerting any adaptive pressure. Like at the scale of time that they've existed, right? Like that adaptation usually takes a really long time. I mean, I do wonder if there's some adaptive pressure towards detecting cars, right? Because like the animals that you see getting hit by cars most often tend to be nocturnal animals with very poor eyesight who cannot see the car coming and they don't know what's there. Or they're very, very slow and they can't get out of the way fast enough. True. Like armadillos and opossums and stuff like that. They just don't have great eyesight. But deer, like they have the capability, I think. And they choose. They're getting hit by cars for the love of the game. It's their hobby. They do it on purpose. So yeah, Jack rabbits are just they're really the they're the go fast champion of North America. They're extremely fast. What's their diet? Rabbit stuff. Okay. So nothing strange. Like they're not chasing their own prey down. No, I did actually see some, I saw this a lot in YouTube videos, which I think goes to show how reliable YouTube videos are. I saw some YouTube videos make some bold claims that Jack rabbits actually like eat meat and are like the only types of hairs that eat meat. I could not back that up with anything. I could not find any evidence that they ever ate meat other than incidentally, like totally by accident did not mean to their digestive systems certainly are not made to digest meat. So if they do eat meat, it would be like that or starve like sort of situation. I doubt that it happens very often, if ever set that one time in Monty Python. Did that happen in Monty Python? Yeah. The runaway runaway. And there's a little cute rabbit. Oh, I see. I see. Maybe that's where it came from. Maybe that's where the idea came from. They'll sometimes eat bugs, but even that seems to be incidental. Like they're just eating grass and or like sagebrush or something. And like there's a bug on it and they just eat it by accident. So I don't think they're they're definitely not hunting, but that would be a cool idea. Like a cool story idea. I do feel like hairs and Jack rabbits in particular are rich veins for like fantasy folk horror because of how spooky they look in the nocturnal. So they're running around at night and the desert is just inherently spooky. Like everything's spooky in the desert at night and Jack rabbits are just like emblematic of that. You catch one of these. I mean, you see them in broad daylight. They're already kind of spooky. But if you're seeing one that's kind of like lit by a flashlight in the middle of the night, that's a jump scare. So another thing that I want to talk about for their effectiveness is their ears because like you can't talk about a rabbit without talking about their ears. But Jack rabbits in particular have the ear slider is as far to the right as it'll go. Like they have really invested a ton of their points in their ears. Like Jack rabbits have much bigger, wider like sort of satellite dish ears. Let me show you a picture if you haven't seen one recently. And they're not floppy like some rabbits. They're not floppy at all. I think it's only domestic rabbits that have floppy ears. Really? Yeah, I don't think there's any wild rabbits that have floppy ears. But I'll show you an example. So this is an antelope Jack rabbit, which is maybe my favorite species of Jack rabbit. Oh, look at that. Yeah. Absolute satellite dishes on this fellow. Like it looks like a gust of wind would carry him into the air. So I'm sure I could guess. Take some guesses. Heat sink. There you go. Yeah. You've been on this podcast too much. You're shut up. You're taking all my notes. Well, I mean, perhaps the more obvious one, what do you have big ears for? Well, I mean, perhaps hearing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is still a prey animal, right? They need to hear something sneaking up on them. They need to hear if something's approaching them. They're independently rotatable so they can turn each ear independently of the other and hear direction really well. But at that point, it's probably past the point of diminishing returns as far as hearing is concerned. Right. So you've probably reached a point where you're good, like hearing wise, long before this abomination. So that also doesn't really help them out a lot with predators in the air. Like something that's not going to be like an owl or something that's not going to be making a lot of sound, right? Like doesn't super help with that. Although I don't know. I mean, if their hearing is acute enough, they might be able to hear very, very small movements that could be helpful. But yeah, a lot of the reason why their eyes are so incredibly large, especially compared to other types of rabbits and hares is something we see in a lot of desert animals, which is that the ears are acting as a heat sink. Do you want to expand on the heat sink thing? Yeah. With your air conditioning sort of... It's akin to a special interest, I think. A little bit. I think you know a little bit more about air conditioning than the average person. Also because you know, my dad still works in the industry and he's been in that industry for I'm pretty sure as long as I've been alive. Taught you a thing or two? Are you an air conditioning nepo baby? No. No. Well, but also in Florida, we had our air conditioner broke every 30 minutes. I'm the type where like if I'm suffering, I need to understand all the ins and outs of why I'm suffering. Like oh, I'm like this because this is broken. Oh yeah. It's actually not me at all. There's an identifiable problem. This is why it's 90 degrees inside my apartment. But anyway, so yeah, we see this with other animals like African elephants and Phinic foxes where their blood supply goes out into these big ears, which has a lot of surface area with the surrounding air. So that maximizing a ratio of blood to surface area maximizes how much heat is being transferred between their bodies and the surrounding air. So like in these places like in the ears where the skin is very thin and the blood vessels are very, very close to the surface. So they're close to the air. That warmth from the blood is dissipated into the air before it turns around and cycles back into the animals body. So it gives it a chance to cool off. And you I think mentioned that computers work kind of the same way. Yes. So yeah, most computers have a processor that generates a lot of heat and usually the overall computer has to solve for removing that heat. That's usually a metal heat sink and with a fan blowing air over it doing the same thing or water cooling systems, which will use water to pull the heat away and then to some fins that have air being blown over them. So something that your computer has in common with Jackrabbit's and Phenic Fox's and elephants. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of these desert animals. So in mammals, the ears just seem to be the most available part of the body. That's just easiest to blow up to massive sizes and have that like in mammals, you see the these desert mammals tend to just have massive comically large ears. So the parts that can be made huge without being a detriment to other things. Right. My hands are my heat sink. There's even a type of fox called the bat-eared fox. That's like just a complete exaggeration of this. Let me see if I can show you a picture. Look at this goober. What is this? Bat-eared fox. Oh. Isn't it silly? It is. Yeah. They're silly little guys. So yeah, that's why Jackrabbit's have particularly large goofy looking ears because they live in hot places and they usually need to lose a lot of that heat to the air around them. And actually Jackrabbit's are actually named after those ears. When English speakers first saw them, they called them jackass rabbits. Oh. Because of donkeys. Because their ears look like the big ears of donkeys. Huh. So they were called jackass rabbits because they have the ears of a jackass, which means donkey. Which used to mean donkey. Yes. Were donkeys endemic to the Americas or did Europe have donkeys as well? You know, I don't know. I feel like no, they're from Africa. Really? That's what it is. They're originally from Africa. Oh. And through trade, I believe they did be dispersed into like a domesticated form of donkey made it into Europe. Okay. But they're originally from, I want to say it's the African wide. The African wild donkey, I think is like the ancestor of domesticated donkeys. Let me look it up. Hold on. Okay. Yeah. The African wild ass equus africanus is the wild ancestor of the domestic donkey. Okay. Because where are my zebra stripes too? Oh, nice. Where my mind was going was like that origin story of the jackrabbit name implies of course that they had come across donkeys before jackrabbit. Yes. Yes. See look. Yeah. They were born in Africa, but they would have been familiar with the domesticated donkey by then. So that's where the jack part of the name came from. I was wondering that. I was like, why do they call them jackrabbit? Like who is jack? What are we talking about? Okay. Kind of the last thing I want to talk about for effectiveness for jackrabbits is that, and this is a big difference between hairs and rabbits. When rabbits are born, have you ever seen a newborn rabbit? Yeah. How is it? Pink and undeveloped. Yeah. Do you remember the word for that? No. It is altricial. So when a baby animal is born just absolutely useless, just a little lump of flesh that can't really do anything. Yeah. That is called an altricial baby. They need a lot of help. They can't be separated from their mother at all. They are completely dependent upon their parents at that point. That is an altricial baby. So like the ugliest of the baby birds, those are called altricial. Can humans be considered? Yeah. Humans kind of are altricial. Yeah. I feel like we need separate tears then. There are degrees of it. Yeah. Because you've got things like marsupials, right? Where they're born without limbs yet, basically. Or like panda bears, which are born like a jelly bean, basically. I guess there are degrees of it. So those are like, those are altricial babies, which are completely helpless. Those are rabbits. Yeah. Hairs on the other hand are the other type. Do you remember the other type? Just like what the term is for the opposite? No, I don't remember. Yeah. Percocial. Oh, okay. So they are very percocial as in when hairs are born, which the hairs, baby hairs apparently are called leverants. I didn't know that. And they have all their fur already. They're like brown fur, fully grown in. Their eyes are open. They are ready to go. And they can run within like hours of being born. All right. Like they hit the ground running. Like a giraffe. Like, and I'm wondering, I'm like, okay, because they are born like we got to move, kid. Like there's no time. We have to go. And just there's so much like frantic energy. I feel like coming from hairs and jackrabbits were like, I'm like, what? What happened to you? I feel like they're holding so much generational trauma as like the jackrabbits are like, what happened to you in your distant past that made you this way? This is crazy. Yeah, it's that it's that haunted sort of like, like, like something deeply troubling happened to them and their natural history that made them just like, bro, we cannot even nest. Like we can't even, we have to move, kid. You got to go. They're coming. I'm like, who? Who's coming? Let's take a quick break to hear from a couple of the other shows on the Maximum Fun Network. And then we'll talk about some other stuff for jackrabbit. Let's get ready to record. Maximum Fun, bringing you the finest of podcasts from the worlds of comedy and culture. Almost a perfect episode made by real people. Oh, no, that my kids gonna cost them. Yeah, I hate to see it supported by people just like you. They're only five seconds away from the longest stretch about saying, um, two, one, and he's done it folks. A new world record. 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These are behaviors, things the animal is doing with their body to navigate their world, solve problems that they face. And I'm giving Jackrabbit's a four out of 10 for ingenuity. Okay, that seems kind of low for what I would consider a mammal average to be. They kind of have one thought and one thought only and that thought is go. Okay. It's just go. They have to go. Where? Who's to say? Not their problem. They just have to go and they have to go there very fast. Where? Away. Destination? Not here. Which I love. That's great. One big thing that I did put in here that I think is purely just hilarious is that when male jackrabbits are competing for mates, they will do this thing where they will raise up on their tippy, tippy, tippy toes of their hind legs and box each other. Have you ever seen this? Yeah, kangaroo style. A lot about jackrabbits does feel like kangaroo software on like rabbit hardware. There's a lot of things about them that do feel very kangaroo. Right? I guess the big exception really being that they don't have that long tail to support themselves with. Like kangaroos have a tail that they can kind of like support their body with and use it for a lot of stuff. But like in jackrabbits don't have that. But in a lot of other ways, they are extremely kangaroo like I do feel. But yeah, they will box each other with their paws. Now there's a few funny things about this. Number one is that they can't balance very well on their hind legs. So the whole time that they're doing this, they're like they're kind of ballerina towing in circles around each other, which is hilarious. Another thing that's very funny is that they're when I say boxing, what I really mean is that they're slapping each other as hard as they can, right? And as fast as they can. Yeah. So they're doing like, like if you've ever seen like boxers, like with like one of those, what's the thing that you like a punching, not a punching bag, but like the boingy thing that like you punch it and it kind of like swings back and forth. I don't know what they're called. Punching ball. I don't know. I know what you're talking about though. I just forget what it's called. Yeah. So they're basically where you just like punch it really fast. Yeah. They're going like, but like this like smacking each other really, really fast. And if you I watched a lot of like videos of them doing this and it makes this like audible slapping sound and they're doing it so fast that it sounds like. Yeah. And also the whole time they're kind of leaning their head away from each other so that their faces don't like catch a stray. And it is so funny because they're just doing this like slap fight. It is very funny, probably not to them, but to me it is. It reminds me that what's the guy in Jojo does that? Oh, you mean everyone? Does everyone do that in that show? I feel like every main character does something similar to that. But they're just like, you know, hit them like a thousand times. Just go. More, more, more, more, more. Yeah. Uh huh. I did want to give the give Jackrabbit's a shout out. A Jackrabbit did score a touchdown at the 2015 Labor Day Classic between the Calgary Stampeders and the Edmonton Eskimos. Apparently they play American football in Canada. I did not know that. I was about to say what sport is this? Yeah. I'll show you. I have a video. Came back onto the field about the same time that Kendall Lawrence caught that return and was coming out of the end. Here you go. Click it and go. And he scores and then has a touchdown. So a Jackrabbit got on the field, which apparently that happened a lot like apparently that is very common. Jackrabbit's get on fields all the time. For them, it's just another field. They're like, oh, great. You mowed this for me? Awesome. So they get on the field, they run around in this particular Jackrabbit just happened to run to the end zone and like make a touchdown. And in the video, he does this like big jump, right? Or he jumps up into the air and kind of like is doing a little bit of a flip, which is very funny timing because it looks like he's doing like a celebratory touchdown dance. Yeah. Some people like in the comments think that maybe the rabbit is doing something called a binky, which is a behavior that rabbits do where when they just get really, really excited, they just kind of like popcorn into the air, like they just bounce like they're not going anywhere. They're just bouncing like because they're excited. I think maybe it was an evasive thing. Like I think maybe the rat Jackrabbit was trying to like evade people who were trying to get it off the field and you know, maybe just jumping up into the air to try to like, it looked evasive to me. The Jackrabbit did not look like it was having a great time. Well, I wonder if it was the crowd reaction that triggered it. Yeah. Like the noise of it, maybe like scared it and jumped up in the air or something because Jackrabbits are very twitchy. Yeah. They're very excitable and they're very like easily agitated. Probably an auditory nightmare. Over stimulated. Listen, at a football game, I'm overstimulated and I'm not like on the field. Like I'm already, it's kind of sensory hell for me and I'm like in the stands. So I cannot imagine what a Jackrabbit is going through. But it was an impressive play. He got some serious yards, which I think is great. Good job. Good job, Jackrabbit. The final category that we rate animals on as aesthetics is just how nice they are to look at. This might be controversial, but I think I would give them a nine out of 10. Wow. I think and maybe it's because of my own sort of like taste. I like spooky things. I like things that look kind of I like horror adjacent imagery and aesthetic. I like that sort of spooky look. So I actually kind of like that they have this sort of like haunted, creepy aesthetic to them. They do look quite creepy. I don't know if you've like seen them a lot. Probably not in person very much, if at all. Let me pull up some pictures because they are not as like they're definitely not as like rounded and cartoony and cute as rabbits. Like, look at that. Oh, yeah. They look almost like a deer. Like they look like halfway between like a deer and a kangaroo. You know what I mean? What do you think? Are these the things that usually people will slap antlers on to? I'm so glad you asked. I'm so glad you asked. I'm going to skip right to that. Because I have a whole thing on this. Yes. So to back up a little bit, there is a disease that can infect types of rabbits or hairs. And it is called the Shope Papilloma virus. This disease can cause large cancerous lesions to grow out of the animal's head. As far as I know, it's only been seen in rabbits and hairs. But in rabbits and hairs, this disease causes these cancerous growths. And these growths can be very, very large. They can be very, very long and often pointy, which from the right angle, especially at a distance, which is where you're probably going to be seeing this animal at a distance, because if you get too much closer, they're going to run. It looks like antlers. It looks like they have horns or like branching antlers because they can often be like clustered. The growths can be clustered in one spot and like growing out of the same spot. So it can, from a distance, look like horns or antlers. This has been suggested as an origin of the jackalope cryptid mythological sort of creature. But the jackalope was popularized in the 1930s by a taxidermist named Douglas and Ralph Herrick. They lived in Douglas, Wyoming. And their version of the story is actually that they already had a deer carcass that they were going to taxidermy. They came home from like a hunting trip with a rabbit carcass and just kind of like tossed it on the ground with the other things that they were going to mount. And the rabbit just happened to like land on the deer carcass in a way where like it looked like the antlers were like growing out of the rabbit. And they were like, no, hold on, that actually looks pretty cool. And just like the way that they tossed it on the ground like gave them the idea to mount the antlers on the rabbit. And so they tried it and it sold for 150 bucks, which is huge money in the 30s. And it ended up being very, very popular. And they ended up making a ton more and really popularizing this idea of the jackalope. So an antelope and a jackrabbit mixed together. Yes, which I'm they must have been referring to the pronghorn. Like when they use the word antelope, America doesn't actually have any native species of antelope, but pronghorns are often called antelopes. Actually, more closely related to giraffes, but they are. Wait, hold up. Pronghorns are more. Right. Weird, right? Isn't that crazy? But they're called an antelope just because they kind of are antelope adjacent. Yeah. So the jackalope ended up becoming kind of like the pride and joy of the city of Douglas, Wyoming, which is where these taxidermists were from. OK. So the city of Douglas has like their like they build themselves as like the home of the jackalope. Jackalopes are on their like city logo. There are statues of jackalopes everywhere. It's kind of like the theme of the city. They're really, really proud of the jackalope because it's like their local thing. Sure. Basically. And I got this from the city of Douglas's website. Jackalope milk may be obtained at the Douglas Visitors Center along with hunting licenses. However, those seeking licenses should be aware of the difficulty in bagging a jackalope. Besides their innate ability to blend in with their natural surroundings, licenses are only issued to those with a demonstrable IQ of less than 72 and are only valid between the hours of midnight and 2 a.m. on June 31st of each year. Wow. How many days does June have? Less than 31. How much do they sell for? I don't know how much they sell for, but you can download a PDF of it on the city of Douglas's website. Oh, OK. But they do say that they are only valid if issued in the city of Douglas or in like Converse County, Wyoming. Could you imagine how many Fish and Wildlife Wardens in Wyoming have stopped fishermen and hunters to like like to see the papers and such and they get handed one of those. One of these bad boys, which, by the way, has like a cartoon jackalope, like printed on it. It's got to happen all the time. Like, what are you doing? So by the way, Douglas, Wyoming has a population of like 6,000 people. Like, this is very much a small town. But I really appreciate the love for the jackalope. I got to say, as a cryptid, first of all, we love a cryptid with like a clear origin story. We love a cryptid that is being fully claimed by the community. They're like, we came up with it. This one's ours. We invented it. Like, I love that they not only are they like fully laying absolute claim to it. They're like, this is ours. We made this. They're also fully leaning into the bit of it being a real animal. They're fully playing along. They're like, yes, it's real and we invented it. See, this is where I think Bigfoot suffers is because it's not localized. Right. It's across the entire continent. Well, I mean, Bigfoot's origins are much older. Bigfoot comes from like folk legends from thousands of years ago. So like, there wouldn't be one community that could claim like we came up with Bigfoot. Yeah, because like there's a huge cultural thing to it in this region and Pacific Northwest, but also we went ourselves to a Bigfoot Museum in Georgia. We did thousands of miles. Not where Bigfoot goes. They were just in it for the love of the game. They love Bigfoot down there. It's cool. But yeah, I really liked that they have a love for Jack Loops. So big big shout out to Douglas Wyoming. Yeah. OK. Side note, side note. I was I was curious about I was like, oh, man, I wonder if like anyone in Douglas Wyoming listens to this podcast and is going to be really excited to hear their city shout it out. Yeah. And I looked, you can see a map of our downloads on our podcast host. Guess how many downloads we had in the entire state of Wyoming for the last week? How many? Zero. Oh, yeah. Not a single soul in the state of Wyoming in the entire state listened to this podcast. Dang. But but we did have a whopping nine downloads from Inglewood, Kansas. Why that is significant is because the city of Inglewood, Kansas has a population of 58, wow, as listed in the 2020 census. All right. So that is an average of six downloads per capita. The entire city. Interesting. So super fans. That is our that's our nexus of popularity right there. We are huge in Inglewood, Kansas. So if you're if you're one of those, I would imagine all nine are probably from the same person, probably. Yeah, probably. If you're listening in Inglewood, Kansas, please, please let me know. If you're the one person. There was actually one more thing that I wanted to talk about for Jack Rabbits. And I did want to talk about the association of hairs with Easter. Oh, yes. Rabbits and hairs, you know, or have sort of long been associated with Easter. And I was kind of wondering why that is. And I have heard floating around on the Internet on like memes and stuff like that that the hairs or rabbits were associated with this ancient pagan goddess named Easter, Ustra or Easter. There are like different ways of pronouncing the name that like predated Christianity and that, you know, a holiday dedicated to the worship of this goddess, Easter, and her hair or her rabbits, like being her sort of main animal. Yeah. Was later over time, like co-opted and became Easter. This was one of those things I just saw as memes. And I was like, you know what, I'm going to look it up. I'm looking into that. So eighth century historian, Bede, B-E-D-E. OK, that's it. That's his whole name. Like Madonna. Yeah, yeah. Mononymous. Yeah. He was a pioneer of the single name. OK. He wrote that he was a monk, so he was like in a monastery. Maybe that's why he only had one name. But he wrote that the English name of Easter came from the pre-Christianity word Eastermonath, meaning Easter month, and suggested that the name of the month was probably named after a festival that happened during the spring, suggesting that it could have been dedicated to a goddess named Ustra or Easter, and that over time, the name for that festival eventually became reapplied to the Christian spring holiday. Because in English, we specifically call it Easter, whereas every other European language doesn't. Really? They call it something like, I know in French, it's Puck. They call it something that's more related to like the name of Passover. But we call it Easter. So the bead was suggesting that we get our English name from this goddess named Easter, but he was completely guessing based on like etymology, because the month was called Easter month. And he's like, they must have called it that because there was a festival or a celebration of some sort during this time. But there is no other reference to this goddess in any other literature. So you really don't see any other references to a goddess by this name. You do see a lot of like towns and like place names with similar names, but it's not really clear if that's named for like a goddess or if that's just named because they're like to the east of something. Right. The idea being that the east part of the name is referring to like dawn sunrise. The idea is that like if she is like a goddess of dawn or goddess of sunrise, then they may have used the word east for her name. Is that where the island name came from? Easter Island? Yeah. Certainly not. I don't think so. Easter Island is like in the South Pacific. Is it east of something? Something, I'm sure. East of Australia. No, east of something. I'm sure it aren't we all east of something? Everything's east of something. No, I mean, maybe that was a Christmas Island situation or like someone landed on it on that day. Oh, I forgot about that. But so anyway, there don't really seem to be any other references to this goddess. So whether or not Easter was an actual goddess is like worshiped by actual like ancient Anglo-Saxons. Historians don't really agree on this. Now, the fact that there isn't any evidence doesn't like lack of evidence is not evidence that there wasn't anything there. Right. So like it could be a lot of things. It could be that nobody documented it. Could just say that they didn't write it down. It could be that the documents were destroyed. Like on purpose. On purpose. Yeah, which that happens a lot, right? Especially if it's like a pre-Christian goddess, like pagan worship, which at the time they would have called heathenry, like heathen goddess. They could have destroyed those records. So like just because there aren't any records doesn't mean it didn't happen. But also I wouldn't confidently say that it happened either. So a lot of people extrapolate this to mean that the goddess of Easter would have been associated with hairs, but that association actually doesn't appear anywhere at all. Even Bede didn't say that. Bede did not say anything about rabbits and hairs having anything to do with Easter. OK. So it's not until Jacob Grimm of the Brothers Grimm, like the fairy tale men in 1835, so like hundreds and hundreds of years later, wrote that Easter's companion was probably a hair. And that is that's kind of retconning because they're like, well, if our holiday Easter originated with this goddess Easter, then our association of hairs with Easter probably also is from that association. Oh. So like hairs and rabbits were already associated with Easter. So it was Jacob Grimm that was like, oh, well, that's probably where that came from. So that was also some retconning. Yeah. But then that kind of like became picked up and repeated around a lot as fact as just like there was this goddess and she was like associated with hairs and rabbits. Yeah. That has become spread around like you'll see this posted everywhere online. People go crazy for it when there's there's not actually any like historical evidence. I can see why, though. It seems like human nature to be like, hey, we all do this one thing and saying we don't know why is not going to fly. So we got to come up with something. Right. But I think that the origins of this are just so much more nebulous and hard to. I don't think there's one specific like this is the one thing. This is the one reason why we associate like hairs and rabbits with Easter. Yeah. It seemed like this is a lot of retconning because there were just unrelated folk associations between spring time, like spring festivals, Easter being a spring festival, right? And hair hunting and rabbit hunting, like eating and hunting hairs and rabbits in the spring. Sure. So it just seemed like an unrelated like folk tradition, basically, to hunt and eat rabbits in the spring, especially for Easter. And there's also like maybe the layer of Easter being the end of Lent. So like if you were not eating meat, a lot of churches don't allow eating meat during Lent or during the Holy Week leading up to Easter. So the idea is that on Easter, that is the end of that period. You are now allowed to eat meat and rabbit would have maybe been a traditional meat eaten at the end of that period. I need flashbacks to the fish, Cappy Bear thing. Oh, yeah. We're Cappy Bear. We're considered fish. The Pope said, Pope said Cappy Bear is a fish. But I guess the coinciding, I guess, themes of the season. It reminds me of Christmas a lot of ways because like a lot of the secular parts of Christmas are very winter coated, right? Whereas the religious event that it's celebrating is not actually a winter thing. Right. Yeah. So like in a lot of our Christmas traditions came from like much older pagan like Yule traditions, right? Like and then eventually since it's all big holidays happening in the winter, they kind of like glom together and like this mega winter holiday. Right. That's just kind of like an amalgamation of all of the different traditions that, you know, different cultures have done in the winter time. Yeah. So that's what it seems like this sort of culmination of like spring festival stuff. But a lot of this also just seems like folk tradition that just it just stuck around, you know, and they're like, well, we're already doing this festival in the spring. And now there's this Christian holiday in the spring. Why don't we just put them mash them together into one big holiday rather than having like a million holidays during the spring? So it's maybe a less satisfying answer, right? Then like, oh, there was this long forgotten ancient goddess of hairs and rabbits. And like that is a much more interesting. I mean, I mean, story, but there just doesn't seem to be a lot of actual like historical evidence to back it up, which once again, not saying that means is not true. I'm just saying I don't have, I can't confidently say. I guess I'm seeing it from the perspective is like, I see a lot of people would not be comfortable with just taking the moment to think, man, this thing I've been doing my whole life. Why am I doing it? And then the only factual answer is I don't know. We keep doing it though. Yeah, like a lot of those answers. It's the way I feel about like the fossil record, right? About how a lot of things we just will never know. Like there are a lot of things out there that we just simply like the evidence for it simply does not exist. Right. Much less like even if it did exist, would I ever find it? Like would it ever be found? Like the likelihood of the evidence both existing and being found is like surprisingly low. So it's like it's not very satisfying to not have that answer. But also I think folk traditions and folk culture just works that way. Like a lot of the stuff never got written down. And that's just how it is. You just have to be OK with that, I think. I did a little bit of a research tangent on the egg hunt tradition also. As far as I could find, seems to have started in Germany sometime during the 16th century. Encyclopedia Britannica specifically says it was started by Martin Luther, like the 95 Theses guy. But the tradition of like dying and decorating eggs goes back way further than that. That's like especially in Eastern Europe, they have really, really beautiful like egg dying with wax and like really, really cool like traditions. And some of that goes back to the idea of like not being able to eat animal products during like Holy Week or Lent. The idea that like if you couldn't eat them, your hens are still laying eggs. Right. But you can't eat them. So like it was just something to do with the eggs that you weren't going to be eating during Holy Week. So that was kind of why I thought the jackrabbit would be an interesting thing, even though jackrabbits are explicitly from America and not necessarily related to these like European holiday traditions. I mean, there's still hair, you know, and hairs are still associated with Easter. So I thought it was kind of an interesting rabbit hole. Wow. Look at that. And that's it. That's all I wanted to say about jackrabbits. Thanks, babe. I love them. Do you like them? I like jackrabbit. I have to reserve my judgment. No, you don't. It's your podcast. This is where you do the judgment. Yeah, I think if you wanted to reserve judgment, don't start those podcasts with me. But no, yeah, I bet I bet get along. You think you'd get along with a jackrabbit? Yeah, I mean, I'm sure they would perceive me as a large predator, but. No, and they catch me at the right time. They might be right. You don't think they would sense your peer intentions? You don't think they would simply, they would simply understand that you're peer of heart, except you as one of their own. You don't think you'd have that Disney princess moment? No. Although maybe you guys have the anxiety in common. Maybe you could bond over, bond over that. Yeah. Well, that's jackrabbit. Thank you so much for hanging out and listening to me talk about jackrabbit. It's Christian. Thanks for talking about it. And thank you, dear listener, for spending this time with us. If you had a great time, I would love it if you left behind some nice words for us in a review on your podcast app of choice. If you want to come hang out with us online, we're on Facebook, Instagram, Discord, Blue Sky. Links to everything will be in the episode description. Once again, please do go follow us on, especially Instagram, I would say, is where I'm most active, because that's where I post, like, when we're doing stuff out and about, right? Like we've got tide pooling. We've got Max Fun Drive Meetup Day coming up. I also in, I think, June have another talk that I'm giving in Seattle. So please keep up with us on there. So you can, if you live in Seattle, so you can come hang out with us. Also in our Discord, we have a Seattle local channel where we post about things going on and, you know, sometimes people get together for birdwatching and tide pooling, all sorts of cool stuff like that. If you want to learn more about the network and how you can be a part of supporting our show, plus get access to our exclusive monthly bonus episodes, like this month we did one about Pokemon. That's over at MaximumFun.org. And finally, we'd like to thank Louie Zong for our theme music. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Christian. We'll talk to you later, baby. Maximum Fun, a worker owned network of artist owned shows, supported directly by you.