Should you find yourself consulting your hare oracle with unseemly frequency, or favouring it to such an extent that your crow oracle sits neglected on the shelf, you may be on the slippery slope to a hare mania leading to criminality. Here is a newspaper cutting from 1904. Consider it a warning.
HARES HIS RUIN
In sentencing a man at Marylebone yesterday for stealing a hare, Mr Plowden said to the prisoner, who had previously been bound over for a similar offence: “You are an honest man, I believe, except when you see hares. Then, your honesty completely breaks down. It’s a good thing you don’t live where hares are abundant.”
Source – Man Bites Man : The Scrapbook Of An Edwardian Eccentric, George Ives, edited by Paul Sieveking (Jay Landesman, 1980)
>It’s a good thing you don’t live where hares are abundant
I don’t think we can credit Mr Plowden with much insight here. Had the prisoner grown up among hares, such creatures would not have tempted his fancy in later life, and instead he would probably have developed a weakness for torque-wrenches, trombones and suchlike urban artefacts.
A similar discrepancy between our longings for the familiar and the unfamiliar generally dissuades us from carnal attachment to our own sisters (whereas such incestuous urges are positively nurtured among those brought up by posses of lubricious harlots, beguiling floosies and the like). But I digress.