Green’s Dictionary of Slang

hare n.

[a poss. link to the dial. puss, a hare, and cat n.1 (1a) + play on SE (pubic) hair]

a prostitute; a promiscuous woman.

[UK]J. Heywood Proverbs II Ch. iiii: Set the hares head against the gose jiblet.
[UK]Gesta Grayorum (1688) 26: Does, Hares, or Coneys, or other Gentlemen’s Game.
[UK]Greene & Lodge Lady Alimony II vi: Yea, there goes the hair away.
[UK]Fielding Tom Jones (1959) 179: The son of a bitch was always good at finding a hare sitting, an be rotted to ’n.
[Scot]Gentleman’s Bottle-Companion 11: Yet finer sport he has in view / And hunts the hare and cony too.
[UK] ‘Some Love To Push’ Cockchafer 48: Our deer we mark in the midnight dark, / And our loaded piece is there, / Our aim we take ere our dear can wake, / And oft we shoot the hair (hare).

In compounds

hare-finder (n.) [play on SE hare-finder, a man whose job it is to find hares]

a womanizer, a lecher.

[UK]Shakespeare Much Ado About Nothing I i: Do you play the flouting Jack, to tell us Cupid is a good hare-finder, and Vulcan a rare carpenter?

SE in slang uses

In phrases

make a hare (v.) [the image of a hare as a foolish creature]

(Anglo-Irish) to make someone look foolish; to expose someone’s ignorance.

[Ire]W. Carleton ‘The Hedge School’ in Traits and Stories of Irish Peasantry (1868) 272: What a hare that made of him.
[Ire]C.J. Lever Tom Burke of ‘Ours’ II 245: It was Mr. Curran made a hare of yer honor that day. Begorra! – I wonder ye ever held up yer head after.
[Ire]A.P. Graves ‘Father O’Flynn’ in Spectator 24 Jan. 111/2: Don’t talk of your Provost and Fellows of Trinity, / Famous for ever at Greek and Latinity / Faix and the divels and all at divinity, / Father O’Flynn’d make hares of them all .
[Aus]Bulletin (Sydney) 18 Apr. 10/3: The Ministers, seeing the newspaper next morning, say ‘Ho, ho!’ and laugh, and the ex-Minister meeting one or other of them during the day, says, ‘Don’t contradict it. I am making a hare of old softgoods. When you read that he has received ‘the following information from an undoubted source,’ or ‘on the best authority,’ or the like, you can guess I’m in it. Let it rip. He played the skunk when I made a slight slip. I’ll stuff him this evening again.
[Ire]S. O’Faoláin A Purse of Coppers 73: ‘For,’ sighed the teacher, ‘He had no sense and people used to make a hare of him ’.
[Ire]J. Healy Wild One (in Magill) Mar. n.p.: ‘He would have loved to be called Doctor O’Malley,’ says McGreevy, ‘and I thought afterwards it was just as well he didn’t because you, Healy, would have made a hare of him.’ [BS].