I still believe in the jackalope

You can take your Bigfoot and your wendigo and your Jersey Devil, I’ll stick with my jackalope. 

A jackalope, for those not in the know, is a tall, sleek jackrabbit, but one with a perkily impressive set of antlers, an all-American critter that leaps and bounds across the wide open plains of Wyoming and Nevada and elsewhere. 

They are rare, it’s true, but their unique evolutionary niche is a special one to many folks in America’s western states. 

Jackalope-ology is also a bit of a throwback to the days when conspiracy theories were, well, kind of fun, as opposed to a sleazy collective of nihilistic grifting and all mankind’s nastiest impulses. I miss silly conspiracies about aliens and sasquatches and Leonard Nimoy on In Search Of. The internet’s kind of ruined that world for us. 

On my last visit to the US, I stumbled across a paperback of Michael P. Branch’s exceptionally deep dive into the long-eared weirdness of it all, On the Trail Of The Jackalope. I had no idea this book existed and it fills a hole in my soul I didn’t know was there.

Branch, a jackalope obsessive, heads out on a road trip across the western USA to interview jackalope makers, worshippers, myth spreaders and more, and in the process drafts a nifty little alternate history of the Wild West. 

America’s long-standing love for the cryptid – enjoyably explored in thorough detail in another groovy book, J.W. Ocker’s The United States of Cryptids, feels less toxic than many other obsessions are in these twisted times.

A jackalope won’t give you cancer, steal your retirement money or be co-opted for racist and sexist lies – it’s just a darned funny bunny with a big set o’ antlers. 

You will find jackalope heads mounted on walls throughout the American west, testament to a dying breed of beast, perhaps, or possibly just a really wacky souvenir.

Way out in South Dakota at the famous Wall Drugstore, an entire wall of faux jackalopes are mounted and available for purchase, as well as all kinds of kitschy jackalopiana – t-shirts, snow globes, shot glasses, posters, keychains, beer, you name it. (I wish now I still had my bumper sticker I bought there back in ’06.) 

Are they real? That depends on your point of view. 

It’s all exploded from a quirky obscurity to a bona-fide subculture, which Branch’s book very entertainingly dissects. Jackalopes became hipster fodder somewhere along the way, and Branch even takes part in a sold-out class of taxidermists in San Francisco all learning to make their very own jackalope. 

I think I first encountered the jackalope in cartoon form – a local cartoonist in the Northern California town where I grew up, the great RL Crabb, frequently drew a gangly anthropomorphic jackalope named Junior, who starred in his own seven-issue comic book series back in the 1980s. Somehow I stumbled across a copy of Tales of the Jackalope and its witty Americana satire (you’d better believe Bigfoot makes an appearance), and the jackalope always stuck in my head.  For a little while, I wasn’t sure if it was all a joke or not.

Then I realised that doesn’t matter. Branch’s hugely fun book takes a wild whopper of a folk tale and gives it another round of life. He even looks at the real-life inspiration for jackalope sightings – rabbits who were infected with a kind of papillomavirus that causes horny deformities growing out of their skulls. Those jackalopes aren’t so cute, to be honest, but a really interesting nugget of information in Branch’s book is about how the study of that virus has helped develop vital anti-cancer treatments for humans. 

The jackalope is my kind of great American myth – not one about swaggering superiority or harsh domination, but one about a spunky little battler who keeps carrying on despite the odds against them. They’re silly, but they also offer us a slight promise of mystery that might still be out there hopping across the western plains. 

The jackalope is a “trickster god,” Branch writes, bounding back and forth between real and imagined worlds. Throughout his travels, he keeps asking people why they love jackalopes.

“I’m always hoping they are real – that there’s something magical hidden around the corner,” Sarah of South Dakota tells Branch. “A unicorn or a centaur, probably not. But a jackalope? That’s something that could be real.” 

Jackalopes might not technically exist, I guess, but I still believe in them all the same.