Black exuberance rabbits are not diabolical creatures but sick animals.
Since last June, they have sworn in the Wyoming and Colorado forests, immortalized in photos and videos on social networks. The wild rabbits of America are contaminated by a virus which sometimes gives them black protuberances.
The sick rabbit is not a jackalope
In American folklore, there is a strange creature, mid-literature, half-anthope, the jackalope. There were already traces of this mutant rabbit in European legends, but two inventive hunters, Douglas Herrick and his brother, who gave him a post-mortem life by grafting deer wood with a hare skeleton to sell hunting trophies in Wyoming. History has spread throughout America. It was not yet moron rabbits but rather false hares for morons … except that it has a medical origin.
In the 1930s, faced with the multiplication of rabbits bearing black outgrowths in Iowa and Wyoming, the American cancerologist Richard E. Shop established that animals were infected with a papillomavirus which caused Cancer in certain specimens – hence basal cell carcinomas and epidermoid carcinoma visible Poor animal. Alas, rabbits can die. The virus was sequenced in 1984 and made it possible to develop vaccines against the development of human papillomavirus (HPV).
Contagious but not transmitted to man
Since the spring and the rise in temperatures, many American wild rabbits have been affected by the disease. Very contagious and transmitted to rabbits by ticks and mosquitoes, the virus develops cancer in around 20% of cases. Even pet rabbits can develop the disease. The only good news from this paper is that the papillomavirus shop is not transmitted to men or other forest animals. And that rabbits do not become hungry blood vampires.
