Jimmy Carter explains 'rabbit attack'

(CNN) - At 537 pages, former President Jimmy Carter's latest book, "White House Diary," is full of behind-the-scenes accounts of his time in the Oval Office - but one incident goes without mention, and it involves a rabbit.

In April of 1979, Carter used a paddle on his boat in Plains, Georgia to splash a rabbit and prevent it from swimming too close to his boat. Thirty-one years later, CNN's Howard Kurtz asked him about the ordeal.

"I was fishing one afternoon…," Carter said on CNN's "Reliable Sources." "…and a rabbit was being chased by hounds... he jumped in the water and swam toward my boat. When he got almost there, I splashed some water with a paddle."

Carter says that the animal turned in the opposite direction and crawled out of the pond. A photographer then snapped a picture, and the legend of the "killer rabbit" was born.