A human-rabbit hybrid (The Book of the Wonders of the Age, 17th- or 18th-century reproduction).

Human × Rabbit or Hare

Mammalian Hybrids

EUGENE M. MCCARTHY, PHD GENETICS, ΦΒΚ

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I am obliged to report that which is reported, but not to believe it.

—Herodotus, The History, VII, 152

Mary Toft

Caution! The evidence for this cross is poor.

Historically, there have been various reports about humans hybridizing with rabbits or hares, but this cross is very poorly documented.

At least one such case seems to have been intentionally fabricated. In 1726, an Englishwoman Mary Toft became the center of a national controversy when physician John Howard announced that he had assisted her in giving birth to several rabbits. This claim was eventually exposed as a hoax, but it’s an interesting fact that, at the time, this assertion that a woman could give birth to rabbits was widely accepted by much of the British population.

There have, however, been claims of human-rabbit hybrids, which, although they may have been hoaxes, have not been demonstrated to be such. For example, a report entitled “A Rabbit Baby” appeared on page 2, column 3, of the November 29, 1860, issue of the Centre Democrat, a newspaper published in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania (source), which reads:

A Rabbit Baby—One of the most singular freaks of nature we have read of for a long time, occurred in the neighboring town of York lately, the particulars of which are given in one of the papers of that place, as follows: “A married lady gave birth to a child, possessing, generally, the forms and whims of a Rabbit. The features bore a close resemblance thereunto; and at the hind part of the head there was a short stumpy tail, precisely in imitation of the small pet animal. The child squeaked with the notes of a Rabbit. It was so formed that it could partake of no nourishment; and during the five weeks of its career on earth, it was necessary to pour, gently, a little milk down its throat. It has but little flesh, and that blue, resembling that of the innocent quadruped to which species it might have been classified to belong, instead of the human family. After much suffering a spasm ended its existence. These remarkable features and gestures of this child, are to be accounted for from the fact that the mother, while enciente, repeatedly fondled and caressed several pet Rabbits, kept in the house.”

Note that the report just quoted gave no personal particulars about the mother or witnesses to this supposed birth—no specific names, no specific addresses—something that makes this report especially unreliable.

Another, equally vague report about a rabbit-human baby appeared on page 3, column 2, of the February 7, 1851, issue of The Athens Post, a newspaper published in Athens, Tennessee (source), which reads:

Freak of Nature.—A lady of distinguished rank in Paris, lately gave birth to a child, which, though otherwise well formed, was totally without a brain [i.e., anencephalic]. The young creature, like the sensitive plant, experienced the liveliest emotion upon being touched. The top of the head was completely flat, which, joined to a long and narrow jaw, gave to the face the resemblance of the head to a rabbit. It lived twenty-two hours, to the great astonishment of the doctors who had assembled to inspect this extraordinary phenomenon.

Happel

Schenck’s depiction of a supposed rabbit-human hybrid.

The incidence of anencephaly seems to be significantly elevated in certain distant hybrid crosses.

The German author Eberhard Werner Happel (Historischer Kern oder so genandte kurtze Chronica, 1690, p. 22) claims that on March 8, 1681 a child with rabbit ears was born at Rotterdam. It supposedly died soon after birth and had a normally formed, viable twin. Happel wrote fiction and nonfiction. His nonfiction works were so voluminous and wide ranging that they were encyclopedic, dealing with almost every conceivable topic.

Similarly, the German physician Johann Georg Schenck von Grafenberg (c. 1560 - 1620) reports (Schenck, 1609, p. 13) that at Königsberg another "child" with rabbits ears was born on Michaelmas (September 30) in 1593 (Königsberg was the former name of modern-day Kaliningrad, Russia).

Hare-human hybrids

The following report appears in the April 17, 1897, issue of the medical journal The Lancet (p. 1128):

From Leghorn comes the announcement on the 8th inst. [i.e., April 8, 1897] of the birth of a monster, the mother being a poor water-carrier of the city, and her offspring resembling from the head to the umbilicus a hare, and from the umbilicus to the lower extremities a normally developed infant. Dr. Botlari, who assisted at the birth, reports that the monster is alive; in place of eyes it has two cavities [the incidence of anophthalmia (congenital absence of eyes) is elevated in hybrids produced from distant crosses], its mouth and nose are similar to those of a hare, and it rejects by the one what is sent into the other and vice versa. The mother volunteered the statement that during pregnancy in a house where she was carrying water she saw a hare cut up in quarters on the kitchen table, and was strongly impressed by the sight. Her health is good; while as to her offspring, in the more than probable event of its dying, it will be added to the local museum in illustration of the lusus naturae which figure in Saint Hilaire’s ‘Teratologie,’ as due to the impressionability of the pregnant.

Nuremburg, Germany On the basis of a letter from a local pastor, Johann Helwig (1680), a physician residing at that time in Nuremburg, claims that in 1641 a woman gave birth to a “monster having anterior parts like a hare, including the head.” The cadaver, which was that of a male, was mutilated, he says, apparently, in part even flayed (perhaps during delivery?). The ears, too, were mutilated, but one long one like that of a hare extended down over the forehead. The body was short, fleshy and lacked arms and legs, but had a single deformed foot.

Liceti’s depiction of a hare-human hybrid.

CracowGalileo’s friend, the Italian scientist Fortunio Liceti (1577-1657) mentions (Liceti 1665, p. 186) a hare-human hybrid supposedly born in the year 1440:

At Cracow, in a suburban estate called Nigrae, a woman gave birth to a male child with the ears and neck of a hare. It was extracted alive, breathing through a wide-open mouth. A great intestine filled its entire abdomen, but it was otherwise normal.^†

† Translated by E. M. McCarthy. Original Latin: “Cracouiae in suburbana villa, cui Nigrae nomen est, mulier puellum edidit collo & auribus leporinis: diducto rictu spirantem: uno grandiore intestino totum ventrem occupante: ceteris membris humanam figuram habentibus.”

Note: Polish renaissance scholar Maciej Miechowita (1457-1523), in his Chronica Polonorum, (1521, p. 358), seems to be the primary source for the Cracow report, since he was living in Cracow at the time in question. The German theologian Christoph Irenäus (1584) refers to a hare-human born in a suburb of Cracow, but says it was harelike with respect to its mouth and neck, and that it was birthed in 1495. He mentions neither ears nor intestines. Whatever this Cracow event may have been, it may have been given a new twist by Polish naturalist Gabriel Rzaczynski (1721, p. 354), who states that a "woman of noble birth," residing in the "Palatinate of Cracow" was given by her husband a hare and a hedgehog as pets. And he goes on to say that she later gave birth to a "prodigious offspring," half hare and half hedgehog.

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By the same author: Handbook of Avian Hybrids of the World, Oxford University Press (2006).