Would you be scared
of a 10 foot bunny rabbit?
Last Sunday, on our own Joanna Schroeder’s Facebook timeline, there appeared a photo of 3′, 22 lb jackrabbit named Herman, which got some us to talking and reminded me of the video review I once made for a ridiculous 70s movie called Night of the Lepus:
For those that can’t be bothered to watch the video, Lepus is the story of what happens when researchers Janet Leigh and Stuart Whitman accidentally cause the local rabbit population to grow to the size of Volkswagens. If that sounds hilarious, it is, but not because that’s what the filmmakers were going for. The film’s true hilarity instead comes from how deadly serious it takes its absurd premise, which simply cannot compete with the innate hilarity of seeing regular size bunnies running in slow motion on scale miniature sets while the sound of a thunderous stampede is heard on the soundtrack.
So, yeah, it’s a very dumb movie, but it does beg the question of how much size affects our natural fear impulses. For example, I love regular house cats, but there isn’t a force on earth that could get me within 100 feet of a free lion or tiger. How big would a rabbit have to get before we stopped seeing something adorable and instead saw something to run away from?
I would be scared alright: I saw a rabbit trying to kill a hamster that was annoying her. With a 10-foor rabbit, I would be that hamster. Rabbits have teeth that can bite through wood.