You mean like this?

Wallace and Grommit: northern.

The were-rabbit (real): terrorising northern recreational vegetable growers. Up north we take our vegetable growing seriously, and have competitions in which brother falls out with brother over who has grown the best onion/leek/green thing. People have been shot, and worse yet not spoken to or bought a pint for some weeks. Exotic excrement, blood, petrochemicals, radioactive waste, things bought on the black market have all been sprinkled on veg patches (often under cover of darkness) to produce a bigger/glossier/better tasting vegetable. I am not making this up. Except maybe the radioactive waste. I used to work in a Yorkshire pub where a nearby old gaffer would sit at his open bedroom window with a loaded shotgun and regularly fire across the village main street at birds of rabbits that looks lustfully at his prize onions.

When no such armed guard exists you get fat, well-fed rabbits up here and the fact that such a mongo Bugs Bunny was found makes me think maybe I was right about the radioactive waste. THem! Not giant ants, but giant rabbits. That’s all folks.

Actually, that weight seems about right to me. The rabbit’s about three feet tall on its hind legs. A fair weight for a six-foot-tall human is about 160 lb. If the rabbit’s half the “height”, then–assuming equal proportions (for the sake of simplicity)–it’s about one eighth the weight, or about twenty pounds. That’s a little more than the weight given, but not much. (Keep in mind the rabbit is probably nowhere near as bulky as it looks in the photo–most of that is (relatively light) fur.) Of course, the assumption of equal proportions definitely introduces some inaccuracy, since a rabbit certainly isn’t just a scaled-down human, but it’s not clear to me which way the inaccuracy is–is a rabbit built more or less lightly than a human? (Being smaller in size, it can get away with proportionately thinner bones, for one thing…)

The image of the newspaper report says he is 40kg, but snopes go on to say he is 18lbs.

That’s an interesting discrepancy I didn’t notice, but note that the image does not necessarily come from a “newspaper report”–it’s not attributed, and the text on the image may not be from a reliable source. On the other hand, the “18 lbs.” figure is quoted from a newspaper report (assuming Snopes quoted it correctly). Frankly, the 18 lbs. figure makes much more sense–keeping in mind, again, that weight scales as the cube of the linear dimensions, 40 kg would be way too much for a rabbit that size to weigh! (I’m guessing the discrepancy probably came about through an erroneous English-metric conversion…after all, 18 kg is about equal to 40 lb., so that’s what the numbers would come out to if the conversion was done the wrong way around.)

Were-rabbit doesn’t mean “A really big honkin’ rabbit”. It means a man who turns into a rabbit, like were-wolf means a man who becomes a wolf.

See the answers.com page for werewolf for a derivation.

BROTHER MAYNARD

Armaments Chapter Two Verses Nine to Twenty One.

ANOTHER MONK

And St. Attila raised his hand grenade up on high saying
“O Lord bless this thy hand grenade that with it thou mayest blow
thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy. “and the Lord did grin and
people did feast upon the lambs and sloths and carp and anchovies
and orang-utans and breakfast cereals and fruit bats and…

BROTHER MAYNARD

Skip a bit brother …

ANOTHER MONK

… Er … oh, yes … and the Lord spake, saying, “First shalt thou
take out the Holy Pin, then shalt thou count to three, no more,
no less. Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the
number of the counting shalt be three.
Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two,
excepting that thou then proceed to three.
Five is right out.
Once the number three, being the third number,
be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch
towards thou foe, who being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it.

Whatever the units, that’s one big bunny! Imagine how lucky you’d be if you carried his foot around with you… (Lucky and muscular.)

Yes, it’s real. There’s an “urban legends” site, snopes.com, which, among other things, makes a practice of looking into seemingly implausible photos and messages making the rounds in e-mail, and determining whether or not they’re genuine. Most of the time, they turn up evidence that they’re not. This time, though, Snopes verifies the validity of the rabbit photo.

Granted, like any other source, snopes.com isn’t necessarily 100% infallible. But they’re reliable enough (and make a practice of citing their sources) that I’m willing to take their word for this.

Like Clifford, I also heartily recommend “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit”. It’s amazingly entertaining and funny. It’s best seen after viewing the three half hour shorts (available on DVD), but it should also be wonderful by itself.