© Harry Whittier Frees/Library of Congress Two kittens wearing clothes firing a cannon in a illustrative image dated 1914.

NEW YORK - Kittens firing a cannon, a rabbit sniffing for drugs, an attempt at humor on the fraught presidential campaign trail and a failed prank by Google competed for attention in the United States on Friday.

As ever, the trick for April Fools' Day hoaxes was to try to be outlandish yet faintly plausible.

The police department in Amherst, New York unveiled a new crime-fighting scheme, showing an officer with a rabbit on its Facebook page.

"Drug interdiction has become more difficult with criminals discovering ever new and smaller areas to conceal drugs," explained the department. "'Dusty' and his handler will be able to search vehicles and other small areas with greater accuracy."

National Geographic, following Playboy's decision this year to stop publishing photos of nude women, said it would no longer degrade animals by showing them naked. The magazine's statement on the Internet was accompanied by a black and white photo of two kittens in jumpsuits firing a cannon.

There was some naked publicity around in the form of bogus ads.

© ThirdLove/Handout via Reuters A dog poses wearing the "Plunge Pawfect Bra" in this photo provided by ThirdLove in New York March 31, 2016. In a political year when reality has often seemed stranger than fiction, pranksters had to work particularly hard in coming up with April Fools Day jokes that rose above the daily noise of the U.S. presidential campaign. The age-old tradition of hoaxing on the first day of April was alive and well on Friday in bogus ad campaigns hawking everything from dog brassieres to employment agencies for babies.

ThirdLove, a lingerie maker, partnered with DogVacay, a pet sitting service, to unveil a line of dog brassieres. ZipRecruiter, an online job service, promoted "Jobs for Babies," a new service to help the diaper set find their dream jobs.

New Hampshire's Dartmouth College, which last year began using a robotic tackling dummy it called "MVP" to reduce the number of hits its players absorb during practice, said the robots would be used in games from next season.

"In the future, we'll line up 11 MVPs and they'll compete in the games for us ... Our players will execute their responsibilities by remote control," Head Football Coach Buddy Teevens said in a video. The film showed a robot, with no arms or legs, failing at football drills such as running stairs and catching passes.

Republican presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Ted Cruz attempted to inject some levity into the campaign slugfest, tweeting that rival Donald Trump had accepted his invitation for a one-on-one debate, before noting that this was intended as a joke.

Traditionally a prank falls flat.

This year it was the turn of Google, which rolled out a feature called "Mic Drop" that allowed users to send emails and not see the replies.

Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc, turned off the feature after users complained it caused embarrassment in work communications.

"Due to a bug, the Mic Drop feature inadvertently caused more headaches than laughs," Google rued.