16 Comments on “Big Ears”   rss feed

1. Samantha on May 26th, 2006 at 8:58 pm

   The feet! The feet!

2. Richard on May 26th, 2006 at 9:59 pm

   Even though I think there’s a little apparent-size distortion caused by a mild wide angle lense, that’s one big hunk of a bunny! It must have gotten into some of that stuff that Alice indulged in. It looks even bigger than the (stuffed) African rabbit I saw in the Harvard Natural History Museum.

   Like Clifford, I also heartily recommend “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit”. It’s amazingly entertaining and funny. It’s best seen after viewing the three half hour shorts (available on DVD), but it should also be wonderful by itself.

3. stevem on May 27th, 2006 at 1:30 am

   I usually don’t comment on blogs and just lurk, but each time you write something I very often get interested enough to usually have something to say on the matter. From the article it seems rabbit breeders produced this rabbit by artificial selection alone. Amazing. I would not have though a rabbit this size could be bred without some help from a lab, like maybe it had been pumped full of growth hormone and anadrol (oxymetholone)
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anadrol
   Despite being very powerful stuff, I doubt it could produce a rabbit this incredibly massive though, just a much heavier and bigger regular rabbit. A rabbit like this would likely not arise in nature via natural selection since excess skeletal muscle and mass is metabolically expensive to maintain, as its hefty diet illustrates. However, in recent years very massive mice have been produced via genetic engineering that specifically overproduces I-GF1 (insulin-like growth factor) in skeletal muscle, and they get real big. When I first saw the picture I wondered if this was something similar. But it is so huge I wondered too if it was a hoax. I would say it is real though.

4. Jeff Nuttall on May 27th, 2006 at 1:39 am

   But it is so huge I wondered too if it was a hoax. I would say it is real though.

   Yes, it’s real. There’s an “urban legends” site, snopes.com, which, among other things, makes a practice of looking into seemingly implausible photos and messages making the rounds in e-mail, and determining whether or not they’re genuine. Most of the time, they turn up evidence that they’re not. This time, though, Snopes verifies the validity of the rabbit photo.

   Granted, like any other source, snopes.com isn’t necessarily 100% infallible. But they’re reliable enough (and make a practice of citing their sources) that I’m willing to take their word for this.

5. erc on May 27th, 2006 at 3:03 am

   Clifford: I think a little questioning of the units is in order here. That rabbit is massive and 7.7kg isn’t that much really. Looking at the snopes page, they are obviously a bit confused. Ignoring that they use the words rabbit and hare interchangably, they have a picture of a second giant rabbit from Scotland. The image of the newspaper report says he is 40kg, but snopes go on to say he is 18lbs. Something isn’t right here…

   Whatever the units, that’s one big bunny! Imagine how lucky you’d be if you carried his foot around with you… (Lucky and muscular.)

6. Cynthia on May 27th, 2006 at 6:52 am

   Come on… Urban legend versus rural legend aside, either this bunny has been injected with massive doses of steroids or is a victim of a cloning experiment gone-a-rye. Then again - perhaps - there is an underlying Truth behind the Easter Bunny!

7. Samantha on May 27th, 2006 at 10:46 am

   No no no - think what has been possible when breeding dogs - the Germans were just being practical: they bred a big rabbit because it made them better for eating.

8. spyder on May 27th, 2006 at 3:06 pm

   i really can’t help it now can i???
   but there is something huge and possibly very nasty about that rabbit–sharp teeth??

   BROTHER MAYNARD

   Armaments Chapter Two Verses Nine to Twenty One.

   ANOTHER MONK

   And St. Attila raised his hand grenade up on high saying
   “O Lord bless this thy hand grenade that with it thou mayest blow
   thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy. “and the Lord did grin and
   people did feast upon the lambs and sloths and carp and anchovies
   and orang-utans and breakfast cereals and fruit bats and…

   BROTHER MAYNARD

   Skip a bit brother …

   ANOTHER MONK

   … Er … oh, yes … and the Lord spake, saying, “First shalt thou
   take out the Holy Pin, then shalt thou count to three, no more,
   no less. Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the
   number of the counting shalt be three.
   Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two,
   excepting that thou then proceed to three.
   Five is right out.
   Once the number three, being the third number,
   be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch
   towards thou foe, who being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it.

9. Supernova on May 27th, 2006 at 6:09 pm

   hee hee, spyder… this is no ordinary rabbit!

10. andy.s on May 28th, 2006 at 6:55 pm

    Guys, neither of those are were-rabbits.

    Were-rabbit doesn’t mean “A really big honkin’ rabbit”. It means a man who turns into a rabbit, like were-wolf means a man who becomes a wolf.

    See the answers.com page for werewolf for a derivation.

11. Brad on May 28th, 2006 at 7:45 pm

    You might even call it a Shaq-rabbit…

12. Jeff Nuttall on May 28th, 2006 at 7:59 pm

    That rabbit is massive and 7.7kg isn’t that much really.

    Actually, that weight seems about right to me. The rabbit’s about three feet tall on its hind legs. A fair weight for a six-foot-tall human is about 160 lb. If the rabbit’s half the “height”, then–assuming equal proportions (for the sake of simplicity)–it’s about one eighth the weight, or about twenty pounds. That’s a little more than the weight given, but not much. (Keep in mind the rabbit is probably nowhere near as bulky as it looks in the photo–most of that is (relatively light) fur.) Of course, the assumption of equal proportions definitely introduces some inaccuracy, since a rabbit certainly isn’t just a scaled-down human, but it’s not clear to me which way the inaccuracy is–is a rabbit built more or less lightly than a human? (Being smaller in size, it can get away with proportionately thinner bones, for one thing…)

    The image of the newspaper report says he is 40kg, but snopes go on to say he is 18lbs.

    That’s an interesting discrepancy I didn’t notice, but note that the image does not necessarily come from a “newspaper report”–it’s not attributed, and the text on the image may not be from a reliable source. On the other hand, the “18 lbs.” figure is quoted from a newspaper report (assuming Snopes quoted it correctly). Frankly, the 18 lbs. figure makes much more sense–keeping in mind, again, that weight scales as the cube of the linear dimensions, 40 kg would be way too much for a rabbit that size to weigh! (I’m guessing the discrepancy probably came about through an erroneous English-metric conversion…after all, 18 kg is about equal to 40 lb., so that’s what the numbers would come out to if the conversion was done the wrong way around.)

13. peter on Jun 1st, 2006 at 6:19 pm

    The Guardian: originally a northern English newspaper (Manchester) before going all metrosexual and moving to London

    Wallace and Grommit: northern.

    The were-rabbit (real): terrorising northern recreational vegetable growers. Up north we take our vegetable growing seriously, and have competitions in which brother falls out with brother over who has grown the best onion/leek/green thing. People have been shot, and worse yet not spoken to or bought a pint for some weeks. Exotic excrement, blood, petrochemicals, radioactive waste, things bought on the black market have all been sprinkled on veg patches (often under cover of darkness) to produce a bigger/glossier/better tasting vegetable. I am not making this up. Except maybe the radioactive waste. I used to work in a Yorkshire pub where a nearby old gaffer would sit at his open bedroom window with a loaded shotgun and regularly fire across the village main street at birds of rabbits that looks lustfully at his prize onions.

    When no such armed guard exists you get fat, well-fed rabbits up here and the fact that such a mongo Bugs Bunny was found makes me think maybe I was right about the radioactive waste. THem! Not giant ants, but giant rabbits. That’s all folks.

14. Jeff Nuttall on Jun 1st, 2006 at 11:00 pm

    THem! Not giant ants, but giant rabbits.

    You mean like this?

15. chloe on Jun 2nd, 2006 at 4:45 am

    i think he’s beautiful! i wanted one until i read how much he eats (omg) and thought of how expensive it would be to keep one, i think i’ll stick with the rabbits i have now, a chinchilla and a lop

16. Katie on Jun 12th, 2006 at 2:15 pm

    Well i would just like to point out that the rural were-rabbit is indeed a real rabbit. I live in Alnwick, about 6 miles from felton and I know Rael who ran over it.
    We are not crazy at the very north east of England. This is true.
    =]

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