Hares are born furred with open eyes—rabbits are not
True hares of genus Lepus nest in shallow ground forms, not warren burrows, so leverets arrive precocial: coated, sighted, and soon independent. They can sprint eighty kilometres per hour in bursts, while jackrabbits leap three metres and keep sixty-five kilometres per hour over distance—and none have ever been truly domesticated.
Native across Africa, Eurasia, and North America, they live alone or in pairs; a group is a husk or a down. Despite names, hispid and red rock "hares" are not Lepus, while jackrabbits are. Belgian hares are selectively bred European rabbits. All true hares carry forty-eight chromosomes; rabbits range thirty-eight to fifty-two. Kinetic skull joints flex to absorb running shocks, and the dental formula yields twenty-eight teeth. Large ears dump heat; spring "boxing" among European brown hares—bucks fighting, does rebuffing—fed the phrase mad as a March hare.
European hares hold about fifty-five kilometres per hour over longer runs. Habitats stretch from desert and tundra to forest and swamp; snowshoe hares may moult seasonal camouflage. Fiber ferments in the cecum as cecotropes that are re-eaten—cecotrophy—to reclaim nutrients. Like other lagomorphs they process soft feces separately from hard waste. Extremely lean meat makes them poor sole survival food despite global hunting, from German hasenpfeffer to Greek lagos stifado; Jewish law deems hare non-kosher while some Muslim cuisines welcome it.
Jugged hare stews the cut animal with wine and traditionally its blood; Hannah Glasse's eighteenth-century Art of Cookery printed a famous method later mythologized as beginning "First, catch your hare." A 2006 UKTV Food survey of 2,021 people found only 1.6 percent under twenty-five knew the dish by name, and seven in ten would refuse it at a friend's table. From March madness to forgotten jugs, Lepus stays wilder than its rabbit cousins.
Source: Hare
