"It all started years ago when somebody mentioned mad March hares. Why would the hares go mad in March? Nobody knew. So I did a lot of research. You can do a little research on the beach with a shovel, you know..
“So I found that it was Easter that caused all the trouble. It might be part of March or go over a little into April, this madness with the hares.
"See hares are rabbits but not all rabbits are hares, I don't think or how ever the hell that goes. Rabbits go around da, da, da, like that. So this old rabbit, he's an old-timer, sees this paper go blowing across and right down in front of him, it was The Pilot, I think, and he looked down at that thing and all of a sudden he makes some strange noises, jumps about three foot in the air and takes off screaming as much as a rabbit can scream and bumping into sagebrush and cactus and stuff. And the other rabbits who hadn't been inoculated said, 'What the hell ails him?'
"And the paper said something about Easter being 13 days away, and when the older rabbits saw this they commenced to have fits. Why did the mention of Easter drive these rabbits into madness? It was always the older ones that went mad. So I researched and ran it down and what I found was the old rabbits who'd been through a lot of Easters who were going into this madness.
"Now a lot of people would like to say that it was just something in the air like when birds start singing and building their nests, but it wasn't. It was the word Easter. See I bought some rabbits and I tried it out on them and the word Easter got a reaction from the old ones.
"Well, it was simple enough! You know yourself that everybody's going out for the Easter bunny. They have Easter egg hunts in the churches and the President of our United States, if he's not too busy this year, will have an Easter egg hunt. It's the Easter bunny laying all these eggs! Now birds go around laying eggs in the most unsuitable places and in that color and this. But rabbits don't lay eggs unless they've been forced to do it.
"Compare the anatomy of a bird with a rabbit, and the bird is especially made to excrete an egg very neatly - and enjoy it! But a rabbit isn't made like that. Not only are they forced to lay eggs about this size but in various colors. A lot of people see an old rabbit and he looks like hell and they say, 'He must have been hit by a car.' Car hell! He just got through laying a dozen Easter eggs. I got a drawing of a rabbit that went through two seasons of laying eggs like that, and he can hardly get around.
"It's a fact. Over at the church they'll have an Easter egg hunt and they'll say, 'Come over here and look at the eggs the Easter bunny laid!' See, the young rabbits don't know any better, and all of sudden they say, 'Here you are boy, you volunteered. All right lay eggs!' The old rabbits have been there before and that's why you don't see too many of them around at Easter. They get the hell out of here.
"After a rabbit has laid an egg, he's never the same again. It does something to their psyches and it does something to their egg-laying parts. So what we're trying to do is say, 'Please, look, Why? If you want Easter eggs in colors, the birds will lay them everywhere. Let the birds do it; they enjoy laying eggs.' If we don't do something we'll end up with a world full of bad rabbits.
"So we need to go to the churches and the President of the United States, well-meaning people, but where the hell they got the idea it was the business of rabbits to lay eggs I don't know! So I'm forming an organization that says write to your friends, 'Save the Easter Bunny!' And then send five cents to me, that's all a membership costs, and I'll put up big billboards that say, 'SAVE THE EASTER BUNNY!' We need a concerted effort by everybody. See, they have a law about you can't abuse a dog; it's cruelty to animals but nobody's worried about saving the Easter bunny's butt. Five cents isn't too much to contribute."
Stephen Smith is a professor of English at Sandhills Community College. He may be reached at travisses@hotmail.com.
