Jan 28 2008
Urban Legend Rabbit Trap
Some urban legends, like some jokes,don’t survive long, nor do they deserve to. A story will survive, while not literally true but encompassing a higher truth, because it’s a bloody good yarn.
This bloke from the city went to the bush to hunt some rabbits. He knew nothing about it and so caught no rabbits at all.
That night he went to the local pub and started chatting with the regular customers. An old rabbit-catcher passed on a good trick. “Catch a rabbit,” he said “Then tie a stick of lighted dynamite to its tail, and let the little bugger go.” In this way the rabbit would be sure to run back to the burrow and blow up the whole rabbit warren.
Of course the city bloke couldn’t even catch one rabbit so he bought a bunny from the local pet shop, then bought the dynamite and the fuse. In the morning he took the doomed rabbit out to an area where hundreds of rabbits were known to live, attached the dynamite to the poor creature, and lit the fuse.
The rabbit of course, was from the pet shop, didn’t know the local area, ran around in circles for a while, then sought out the nearest cover. The cover, naturally, was the city bloke’s new land Rover 4 wheel drive. The explosion blew it to bits.
The Rabbit Trap is an urban legend, a term first introduced by anthropologist Jan Harold Brunvand in The Vanishing Hitchhiker (1981)
An urban legend is simply a prose narrative which the teller believes to be true, it is told as a true story, but nonetheless happens outside of the storyteller’s direct experience. “It happened to a friend of a friend of mine.”
But this yarn has a definite Australian feel to it, although Brunvand includes it in The Choking Doberman, with the rabbit substituted for a coyote. In the US version, a hunter ties dynamite to the coyote as a joke and subsequently his camp is destroyed. Brunvand interprets this as fable of animal revenge (the coyote plays the mythological Trickster role in native America).
Downunder, we could never imagine a rabbit being smarter than us. The Australian version deals with stupidity, not malice. It reiterates the isolation of the ‘outsider’ in the bush, the ‘new chum’ who can’t find his way around. The ‘new chum’ used to be overwhelmingly English and, particularly in the 19th and early 20th century, a stock figure of fun and a pompous know-it-all.
But in Australia even the poor rabbit is a new chum, he’s an outsider too.
Like to shout me a cold beer?
