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Comment by tdeck | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of the frog test, there is apparently an old expression "the rabbit died" in English to refer to someone being pregnant. The original test involved injecting urine into a rabbit, killing it after a few days, and examining it's ovaries

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/the_rabbit_died

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_test

The frog was an improvement since you didn't have to kill the frog (apparently they could survive the urine injection).

FWIW the rabbit always died whether you were pregnant or not :(.

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I was watching M* A* S* H* with residents in a nursing home last week and Hot Lips thought she might be pregnant. The Colonel was concerned because they only had one rabbit and it was Radar's pet.

That made zero sense to me at the time.

In case anyone is worried about the rabbit :-), they ended up using Radar's pet rabbit for the pregnancy test, but removed the ovaries surgically for examination rather than killing the rabbit.

> there is apparently an old expression "the rabbit died" in English

This shows up in the Aerosmith song, "Sweet Emotion"

The rabbit died because it had to be autopsied to inspect the ovaries. Whether a woman was pregnant or not didn't determine whether the rabbit died.

What an astute reading of the text of my comment.

I reacted to:

> FWIW the rabbit always died whether you were pregnant or not :(.

It's not that an injection of urine if a pregnant woman kills the rabbit.

It's like the rabies test on the brain. We cannot look at the brain before you're dead, because the act of looking at it would kill you.

> The original test involved injecting urine into a rabbit, killing it after a few days,

I can see how this might be read in two different ways now.

He says in his comment that they inject the urine, then, a few days later, they kill the rabbit.

Those weren't his words, and his actual words (which he quoted above, acknowledging their ambiguity) could be (mis)read as meaning that injecting the urine killed the rabbit a few days later, especially since he also wrote "apparently [frogs] could survive the urine injection".

I do still find it odd that injecting urine into the frog repeatedly is OK for the frog, but perhaps the volume was quite small.

The rabbit always dies :(

I always think of this short story now:

https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/rabbit-test/

I assumed that the line "can't catch me 'cause the rabbit done died" was referring to a failure to perform the rabbit test -- the rabbit they were using for the test died before the ovaries would have a chance to enlarge, therefore it was inconclusive, therefore it couldn't be proved the singer of the song got the woman in question pregnant.

TIL, poor rabbits :(

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