State: Wyoming · Statute: None found · Filed by The Bureau of Real Laws
In Wyoming, it is illegal to take a photograph of a rabbit from January to April without an official permit. This one has pedigree: it circulates through hunting magazines, trivia compilations, and "craziest game laws" roundups, usually delivered with a wink about Easter pictures. It sounds just plausible enough — game laws really are full of odd specificity — to survive for decades. We went looking for it. It isn't there.
Start with the present day. Wyoming's game code, Title 23 of the Wyoming Statutes, regulates hunting seasons, licenses, and the treatment of wildlife at length. It contains no rabbit-photography permit, no photography permit of any kind for ordinary people. Even the travel sites that retail the legend concede that today there is no "rabbit photography in January" permit regime; modern rules concern seasons and harassment.
Now the past. Retellings that bother to offer an origin claim the rule was "originally passed in 1921," that it covered wildlife photography generally, that a game warden had to accompany each shoot, that it was later narrowed to commercial photographers, and that it was "fully repealed in 1969." Impressive detail — and none of it comes with a citation. No statute number, no session-law page, no archived text. These specifics appear only in recent, unsourced web articles that read like each other's footnotes. When a law's biography gets more detailed as it gets further from any record, you are not reading history. You are reading varnish.
Here is what genuinely exists: in 1921 Wyoming did enact a sweeping game code — chapter 83 of the 1921 session laws, "An Act providing for the protection, propagation, preservation, and distribution of the game animals, birds, and fish of this State." It is real, it is archived (Duke's historical law repository carries its text), and its surviving sections are exactly what you'd expect from 1921: bans on shooting game fish, bans on firearm silencers in the field. Cameras: nowhere. Permits for rabbit portraits: nowhere.
The Bureau offers this as theory, labeled as such. Early game laws policed the "molesting" and disturbing of game, especially in closed and winter seasons, and they regulated "taking" wildlife — a word that sits uncomfortably close to taking a picture. The double meaning of "shoot" did the rest; the conflation was already a joke a century ago, when Kodak advertised, "There are no game laws for those who hunt with a Kodak." Somewhere along the retelling chain, a winter-protection rule for game animals shrank into a permit for photographing one specific, maximally adorable animal, and the dates January-to-April — roughly small-game closed season — gave it the ring of a real regulation.
But a ring is all it has. No Wyoming lawmaker, warden, or archivist has ever produced the text, and neither could we.
Photograph Wyoming rabbits in January, February, March, and April at will. No permit exists to apply for, which must be a relief to the rabbits' publicists.
VERDICT: FOLKLORE — a real 1921 game code, a real seasonal-protection era, and a rabbit rule conjured out of both.
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