MAD AS A MARCH HARE

MAD MARCH HARES

The month of March is linked with the notion of mad hares who frantically chase each other and often indulge in what look like boxing matches. But why do they do it?

According to the BBC’s Countryfile.

Most people would assume that boxing is the courtship display of male hares, eager to prove themselves a worthy mate to females. It may surprise you to find out that it's in fact the females who instigate boxing as a way to fend off the mating urges of the males.

Hares are usually solitary creatures but come March/April time, you can see females standing on their hind legs and boxing like champions, giving male hares the unmistakeable message, 'no, thank you.'

So there we have it. But I guess that the pugilists are not entirely successful or there would be no baby hares. They’re called leverets and the males are called bucks and the females does. Or alternatively jacks and jills. Maybe it’s this confusion of titles which makes hares so riled up.

My advice is to be very careful not to upset them. Hares are swift animals and can run up to 80 km/h (50 mph) over short distances so without a doubt, they’ll catch you and box your ears.

My favourite image of the hare, however, is when they sit and gaze in tranquil meditation at the moon.

The phrase as mad as a march hare was said as long ago as the sixteenth century but became popular with the publication of Lewis Carrol’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

And still the madness continues.

Kit Williams was famous for his book Masquerade.

He had made and hidden a beautiful golden jewel of a hare.

The book gave excruciatingly complex clues to where he had placed it. It started a craze as frantic as a very mad hare with people spending years on the quest.

Sadly, it ended with chicanery and scandal as someone used insider knowledge to find the jewel. Bamber Gascoigne, the first quiz-master of University Challenge, had been invited by Williams to witness the treaure’s burial and has written Quest of the Golden Hare about it. He says:

Tens of thousands of letters from Masqueraders have convinced me that the human mind has an equal capacity for pattern-matching and self-deception. While some addicts were busy cooking the riddle, others were more single-mindedly continuing their own pursuit of the hare quite regardless of the news that it had been found. Their own theories had come to seem so convincing that no exterior evidence could refute them.

Hares only get mad in March.