Mark Twain made no point of calling the hare "rabbit" Rabbit

It seems like no one knows the reason why early colonists dropped the word hare.Yet hares are very different from rabbits. Besides biological differences hares will never be pets. Rabbits are pets, bunnies.
The hare is a special animal, creature of wild nature,lore, religion and legend. Why are prescriptivist fighting over a hyphen and not a word against the misnomering of the Hare?

What's in a name

Hare
.E. hara "hare," from W.Gmc. *khasan- (cf. Du. hase, O.H.G. haso), possibly with a sense of "gray" (cf. O.E. hasu "gray"). Cognate with Skt. sasah, Afghan soe, Welsh ceinach "hare." Hare-brained is from 1548, on notion of "flighty, skittish;" hare-lip is from 1567.
"þou hast a crokyd tunge heldyng wyth hownd and wyth hare." ["Jacob's Well," c.1440]

Rabbit
1398, "young of the cony," from Fr. dialect (cf. Walloon robète), dim. of Flem. or M.Du. robbe "rabbit," of unknown origin. The adult was a cony (q.v.) until 18c.
"Zoologically speaking, there are no native rabbits in the United States; they are all hares. But the early colonists, for some unknown reason, dropped the word hare out of their vocabulary, and it is rarely heard in American speech to this day. When it appears it is almost always applied to the so-called Belgian hare, which, curiously enough, is not a hare at all, but a true rabbit." [H.L. Mencken]