Creative
Extra Big Easter Bunnies
Is there a case for colossal rabbits?
Who hasn’t cuddled a sweet, nose-twitching bunny when Easter rolls around?
My guess is very few of us. Almost everyone is familiar with the silken fluff-bundle we call a rabbit (which is a lagomorph, and not a member of the rodent family as many assume). Their clarescent eyes and beautifully-furred ears lure us into hypnosis time and again, while in the meantime they chew through the wires that charge our phones, lamps and electronic devices, birth inconvenient numbers of kits at inconvenient times, and wreak sanctioned havoc with bunny-tailed flourishes.
Depictions of rabbits in literature and the media are forever on-going. For that we have such works as Watership Down, The Velveteen Rabbit, Zootopia, and veteran actress Glenn Close to thank.
But what if there were more to rabbits? And what if that ‘more’ meant that their sheer size could compel any natural predator into thinking twice before the prowl?
Anomalous reports from the UK, Australia, and the US state of California may suggest that the curious phenomena of colossal rabbits are indeed a ‘thing’, or at least could have been until very recently.
How large are we talking?
The following stories offer a brief introduction.
A youngster by the name of Karl Pflock, who was five years old in 1947, happened to be out in the field behind his Campbell, California home when he caught sight of something — impossible, let’s say.
What the boy later explained that he saw was “…a huge rabbit — [with] giant ears, eyes like saucers, and at least six feet tall.” Neither the boy nor the monster rabbit felt inclined for a more close-up encounter. Instead, they fled: Pflock into the house, and the colossal rabbit into the shelter of an orchard nearby. The account continues:
“When I ran into the house and to my mother for comfort, …she [sic]pooh-poohed everything, of course, patted me on the head, told me not to fret. All I’d seen was an overfed jackrabbit [she said]. But I knew better, and still do.”
There are several other accounts of run-ins with ‘giant’ rabbits, but what sets Pflock’s encounter above the rest is the exaggerated size of the animal he saw. A full six feet of rabbit might seem a little too much to be believed, but it isn’t totally without precident. Naturalist Ambrose Pratt suggested that what Pflock claimed to have encountered could have been a relict specimen of Diplotodon optatum, the world’s largest marsupial ever to have lived. It went extinct only six thousand years ago, which puts it squarely in the middle of the map of modern human civilization. The fact that the optatum was a marsupial may, for some, rule it out as a possibility in this case, but we musn’t forget the opossum (America’s cuddliest marsupial mascot).
Further possibilities include the Palorchestes azatel — a pony-sized marsupial which weighed a whopping ton — though, since it had the back legs and tail of a kangaroo, it is less plausible. Pratt also speculated that the California creature might have belonged to the extinct kangaroo subfamily Sthenurinae.
The creature encountered by five-year-old Pflock is easily dismissed as anomalous. Gold prospectors in Australia, however, reported nine-foot long rabbits on a regular basis (in these cases, the lagomorph-like cryptid was called a ‘bunyip’).
In Ireland, and also in 1947, witness Michael O’Regan saw what he at first took to be a large dog at a distance of forty feet. When the animal came into full view, he was shocked; this large, dog-sized creature was not a canine. It was starkly clear to him that what he was seeing was a rabbit. O’Regan’s brother, who was also present, was not so sure. He believed that the creature was instead an over-sized mountain hare (Lepus timidus). But the problem with that theory is that these kinds of hares, even at the large end of the spectrum, rarely exceed twenty-four inches and approximately nine pounds.
Over in England were several more sightings of dog-sized rabbits in the countryside, including two in Hampshire and Surrey. Gary Cook of East Worldham described the long ears of the rabbit he saw, which ‘reached all the way down to the ground’.
So how plausible is the idea that giant, canine-sized rabbits (or hares) are making studio-sized burrows in the meadows of Great Britain, Ireland, and the United States? To answer that question, I turned to the books and found what could be a reasonable explanation: the Flemish Giant.
Also called ‘gentle giants’ by their handlers because of their docile countenance, the Flemish Giant’s origins began in 16th century Belgium, though at that time they grew to only eight pounds. In the current era, they’ve come to weigh between fifteen and twenty-two pounds. That’s more than enough bulk and weight a rabbit would need to be mistaken for a puppy, or small breed of dog, at a distance.
Trouble is, there’s not much evidence out there to support a relict group of Flemish-like rabbits in the wilderness. There might have been a strain still living back in the World War Two era, but such rabbits surely would have been ferreted out and hunted to extinction. Like all lagomorphs, the Flemish Giant is prolific. Gestation lasts only about a month, with anywhere from five to twelve kits per clutch born in the wintertime.
Today, the even-tempered Flemish Giant is still flourishing as a wonderful pet and a delight to children everywhere, but it’s unlikely that any relict species can be found in the wild.
While the evidence for giant rabbits is flimsy, nothing is really entirely impossible. It’s also fun just to imagine, especially around the Easter Holiday.
Sources: Cryptozoology A-Z, Wikipedia
