Short Stuff: Jackalope

Jackalopes aren’t real, right? Wouldn’t you like to know, city slicker.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and this is short stuff,
the shortest stuff of all about Jack Lopes. Do you
hear that siren? No? Do you hear now? No? Do
you hear it now? No? Now I do? Yeah. Do

(00:25):
you remember, Chuck? There was a period of time where
the fire department would layer down the street every time
we recorded. It was weird, like there was either somebody
who kept like faking a sprained ankle at the same
time on the same day every week, or they were
testing something out that we're not familiar with, but it

(00:47):
happened a lot. Yeah. That that was when we just
started podcasting, and they were like, go in that closet.
And then it got to be a little bigger and
they were like, well, I guess you guys should at
least be in that dumb office. And then after a
little while longer, eventually they're like, Okay, I guess we'll
put up a studio. Yeah, they said, it's just like
that too. They're so upset, And now look at us.

(01:09):
Now we're like podcasting from home, speeding towards twenty years
in our basement, yeah, that's right. All right, So jackal opes. Uh,
if you listen to our Taxidermy episode Taxidermy, no, no, no no,
it was regular Taxidermy. Oh well, we've done one on
rogue Taxidermy too, haven't we. We covered that in Taxidermy.
I don't know if we did a stand alone we

(01:30):
may have. All right, okay, go ahead, I'm sorry. But
either way it was in both, then this might be
take three. But if you've never seen a jackalope, just
pull your car over. If you're at home, just type
in jackalope. They're fairly familiar here in the United States
as sort of kitchy um art that you can hang
on your wall. Jackallyps are not real. It is a

(01:51):
combination a taxidermy combination of a rabbit or a hare
with antlers. And I grew up seeing them here and
there at roadside diners or if you travel out west
or something like maybe a hotel lobby wall, and and
the whole thing with jacolypse is always that you try
to convince somebody that it's a real thing. Yeah, it's

(02:11):
very annoying, like that's a really annoying, unnecessary part of
the whole thing. But it's a Wyoming tradition. From what
I understand, it's the snipe hunt of wall Art. That's
exactly right. Um. And there's lots of legends and tall
tales about the jaclopes that they have really nice singing voices,
and that in particular, if you're out on the range

(02:32):
and you have a campfire going, you start singing cowboys
songs that from out in the out in the bush brush,
they'll start singing in. They'll join in on the course
and everything, which is kind of adorable. They're also supposedly
cousins to big Foot. Um. They're pretty great and probably
the cutest mythical creatures there are. Um. But they actually,

(02:53):
as far as the New York Times I think reported
in nineteen, there's actually like a real life origin story
to them that we may or may not have discussed before,
but we're definitely going to again here. That's right. The
origin story is I think very well vetted. Uh. This
is the kind of thing where it seems like it
could be because there's just so much, um, so many

(03:16):
tall tales surrounding jackalopes. That seems like the kind of
thing where the origin could be very highly suspect. But
it seems like, this is totally real. And the Herrick
brothers H E, R, R, I, C K and Wyoming,
And we should mention Wyoming is very much into their
jackalopes because of this, because they were where it all started. Yeah,
if you look at the Wyoming Lotteries logo, there's a

(03:39):
jackalope on. Yeah, it's a big deal in Wyoming. As
a matter of fact, there's at least five times. Uh,
the Wyoming legislature has tried and failed for some reason.
I don't get it to make the jackalope Wyoming's official
state mythological creature. Maybe they're trying to really govern and
do something that matters. I guess so. I suspect Liz

(04:02):
Cheney is killing this every time. I don't know why,
but I do. Uh. So the Herrick brothers, you know what,
maybe we should take a break and leave a cliffhanger
as to what they actually did. Okay, it's short stuff.
Why not? Well, now we're on the road driving in
your truck. Want to learn a thing or two from
Josh can Chuck. It's stuff you should know, all right,

(04:41):
all right, it's quite a cliffhanger. I know about the
Herrick brothers, H Douglas Herrick. He was born in Douglas,
Wyoming in nine. He's in the Air Force during World
War Two and then worked as a pipe fitter and
was a big hunter because he is in Wyoming and
there's there's a lot of people that are into that there.
And his brother Ralph, they got into taxidermy at an

(05:04):
early age and had their own taxidermy shop. And as
legend goes, one day, one of these brothers, and it
was the year is kind of um debatable, could be
thirty four, thirty nine or forty is what I've heard.
One of them came back from a hunt, had this
jack rabbit slid it across the table and it hits

(05:26):
little dead head slid and perfectly met a pair of antlers,
and one of them said they check that out, and
the other one said that's awesome, and that was it.
That was it. They said, well, we're taxidermists, we might
as well make this happen, and they did. It's a

(05:47):
very sad origin story because of the dead rabbit, but
other than that, it's pretty cool. They made one. They
actually just made one, I guess from that rabbit and
those antlers and um, there was a guy named Roy Ball,
who had a hotel in Douglas, Wyoming, who got wind
of the brother's little invention, and he bought it off

(06:08):
of them for ten bucks back in again nineteen thirties
at the latest, which is substantial um. And he put
it up in his hotel and it became uh basically
a little legendary piece of like you call it wall
art uh. And it stayed there for a good three
maybe four decades, and then someone actually stole it off

(06:29):
the wall and was it was never never found out
who did it. It was never recovered. The original jackalope
maybe in somebody's garage or attic or even maybe on
their wall somewhere out there, and they may not even
know that this is the original jackalope that the Herrick
brothers created. So this is where I have to confess,
because every time I was researching this, when we got
to this part, I kept thinking of the story. In college,

(06:53):
I stole something with my friends and I in college
one time when we were out doing bad things and
a night out and Athens, we took a stuffed porcupine
from a bar that was hanging on the wall, and
that porcupine lived in our apartment for about six months
before we returned it. Oh you did return it? Huh yeah,
we read it well. When we moved out, we're like,

(07:14):
what do we do with the porcupine? What bar was it?
I want to say it was Gus Garcias. Do you
remember that place? No? I remember it was that the
same thing as Guesses maybe, I think so. I've only
heard of it referred to as Gusses. Yeah, that's probably
one of those things where you knew the cool kid
name and I was older and more square, so I
called it by It's a given name. So so how

(07:35):
did you guys return it? We have to know. I
believe it was like, um, you know the fine upstanding
thing that you do when you go and throw it
at the front door and run with a note through
one of the quills that said like, you know, we
took this six months ago, sorry, signed anonymous. At least
you gave it back to Gus Garcia. Yeah. So somebody

(07:58):
stole that original jackalope and did not even have the
you know, the fourth rightness to throw it on the
front porch at that hotel. So it remains gone. Man,
do you remember Uptown Lounge in their happy hour with
fish bowl Margharita's. I don't remember going to the happy
hour there. Oh it was insane. Athens is a lot

(08:21):
different now, Yeah, I know when you were there. Oh,
I can't remember what we passed through there for about
three or four years ago. Okay, not too bad. I
still go occasionally, and um, yeah, it's a lot different
grown up, A lot can still porcupines willy nilly anymore. No,
there's no college shenanigans. Everybody's like an activist and interested

(08:44):
in like important things, and we're like basically like animal
house or something. Pretty much. That was what we were
like in college. Uh So, Yeah, this original Jackalope was stolen,
and like you said, they never caught the thief. But
this kind of kick started a thing for the Herrick
family and they started making and selling these things. I

(09:05):
don't I tried to find out if they held any
kind of weird patent or not, or if they were
knockoff jacko loobes. But they sold tens of thousands of these,
which I really have to point out here. We're talking
about tons of thousands of dead rabbits and dead deer,
some of which may never have been otherwise dead had
it not been for the jack Lope craze. Yes, I

(09:28):
think it had it's worth remarking. I don't want to
be a downer here because I know it's all sweet
and cute and hot like they like to to to
put the hurt and on tourists brains with, you know,
talking about it's real or whatever. But a lot of
rabbits and and Dee or died because of this, this
whole idea like it's real dead is what it is
exactly just for this rogue Taxadermy No, I agree. I

(09:49):
love those rabbits. I don't want to see him hanging
on a wall with antler sticking out of their heads. No,
let the rabbits live. But Douglas, I think, uh wall
drug in Wyoming, which has a giant jackalope. There no
wal drugs in North Dakota. Oh it is okay. So
they became a distributor and they have a giant jackalope.
So eventually, when Douglas Herrick, the initial jackal oper died

(10:11):
in two thousand three, I think his son was interviewed
by the New York Times and said that they were
selling it looks like, you know, fifteen to two thousand
of these a year just a wald drug. Yeah, yeah,
it's a lot of rabbits. It is a lot of
I feel like we've really kind of taken this thing
on a nose dive, but um, I feel like we

(10:33):
could also take it on an even bigger nose dive
in a second, chuck, let's do it with the shop
Papioma virus. Uh. It's so sad to look at these pictures.
It is sad, but it's also fascinating. It's much more
gratifying to look at um botanical or not botanical biological
um Yeah, botanies just plants, biological um or like nature

(10:58):
illustrations of it. Yeah, the um it's related to HPV
and it's an affliction that can cause rabbits to develop
these horns, their tumors basically, and they can come out
of their face looking like a little horns. So there
are pictures of rabbits with all these horny spikes thrusting
from their face and heads, and it's just look a

(11:18):
lot like war hogs. Yes, sort of like a rabbit
war hoog. And like, what's what's interesting to me? There's
actually one in the Smithsonians collection, their animal collection, dead
animal collection, I should say, um and that they that
doesn't seem to have informed the Herrick brothers creation of
the jackalope. Those are two different things, but there was

(11:41):
a period of time. I think the first sightings are
described in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. Yeah, the seventeenth
century um that that people wondered if there was a
species of rabbit out there that had horns or antlers.
And it's just totally tangential to the invention of the jackalope,
nothing to do with it, and even tangential not even

(12:02):
connected in any way. And that's jack galobes, that is
jack lops. If you want to know get to know jacklebs.
You could do worse than traveling to Douglas, Wyoming, which
is the official, as proclaimed by Wyoming Governor Ed Herschler,
home of the jacklope. That's where they hail from. And again,

(12:22):
you could go play some scratch offs in Wyoming with
their lottery and see jackalope. Yeah, and you can even
buy a little fun fake jackalope hunting license. Yeah. I
thought that was kind of adorable, which is not real obviously.
I think they grant hunting from sunrise to sunset on
one day a year. Yeah, but it's a day that
doesn't even exist June thirty one, but it coincides with

(12:43):
Douglas is Um Jackalope Days festival, which I think is
held in June as well. So if you're all about
the Jackalopes, yeah, killing rabbits, they do. And we also
have to give a shout out, which we probably did
in the Taxidermy episode two to our from Van Nostrin
who once had a band called the Jacklyps. Remember that's right,
and also shout out to one of the nicest hotels

(13:04):
I've ever stayed in on our Australia tour on our
down days, the Jackalppe Hotel. Oh is that right? Yeah?
That was amazing. I could see Australians loving the jack Lope,
but it's probably actually real in Australia. That's right. Um,
I guess that's it. Chuck doesn't have anything more. I'm
assuming I don't either, so that means, of course, short

(13:24):
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