The Tamed Hare

The following is excerpted from The Hare by Jill Mason.

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Books written a hundred years ago suggest that leverets were quite easy to rear artificially, but modern opinion differ with those findings.

The poet William Cowper kept three Brown hares as pets: Puss, Tiney, and Bess. Despite their names they were in fact all males. Bess was always tame but died soon after he was fully grown. Tiney never did become tame and would strike our with his forefeet, grunt and bite if anyone tried to handle him. He lived until he was eight years and five months old and Cowper described him as being “the surliest of his kind.”

Puss, however, grew to be tame and was delightful to have as a pet. Apparently he was happy to be carried around and could be let out into the garden. In fact, he would ask to be taken out there by drumming on Cowper’s knee or pulling at the skirts of his coat with his teeth. Puss lived until he was eleven years and eleven months old.

An account of his hares, written by Cowper himself, appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine on May 28, 1784, and filled seven pages. He observed that they would investigate everything, using particularly their sense of smell. He recounts that they detested some people but were immediately attracted to a miller who visited. Presumably they were drawn to him by the pleasant smell of wheat and flour on his clothes.

Another person who kept a doe for more than two years recorded that he found her to be most active after dark and very sensitive to changes in atmospheric pressure (changeable weather).

W.B. Yeats in his poem Two Songs of a Fool wrote, “A speckled cat and a tame hare eat at my hearthstone and sleep there.” There are other accounts of young hares being fostered on to cats feeding kittens, and of older hares living quite happily alongside pet dogs and even being taught to do tricks. J.J. Manley, author of Notes on Game and Game Shooting (1881), commented that “many of us have seen performing hares in the London streets,” although he himself had not been able to tame one.

It is generally agreed today that young hares are difficult to rear, even when they are artificially fed on milk substitute such as cat’s milk replacement. If they do survive, they usually prove to be very highly strung. A single hare is much more likely to be tamed than when two or three are reared together. [Case in point:] Carine Neyt, who lives near Ghent in Belgium, successfully reared a male hare that she rescued as a baby from the mouth of a neighbour’s dog. Poliet, named after a hare in a Belgium children’s book, spent the first year of his life in Carine’s home. He is now eight years old and unusually tame.


See also the previous posts:
Epitaph on a Hare
Hare ’o the Tabor
The Year of the Hare