Jack Ben Rabbit

Jack Ben Rabbit is a fiberglass jackrabbit eight feet tall on the lawn at West 8th Street and North Sam Houston Avenue in Odessa, Texas. The chamber of commerce put him up in 1962, had him made by a California plastics firm that no source names, and paid a reported 2,300 dollars. The name is a joke on John Ben Shepperd, the chamber president and a former attorney general of Texas, whose idea he was. He was bolted down to the pavement after somebody tried to steal him in 1997, and he lost his title in 2017, when Ralls, Texas raised a jackrabbit 14 and a half feet tall. The statue points at an episode that later drew national protest. In May 1932 the Odessa rodeo staged a jackrabbit roping as a publicity stunt at 3rd and Grant. The sheriff objected, the mayor and a local judge decided no Texas law forbade it, and a cowgirl named Grace Hendricks roped one in five seconds flat and beat a field of men. A marker says she did it from horseback; her family remembered her on foot, in a dress, having come straight from a tea. The event was revived in 1977, drew national outrage, and was stopped in 1978 by a court order won by the Humane Society. A state historical marker put up in 1964 stands beside the rabbit, and it is about the animal rather than the statue: the speed of 45 miles an hour, the value to Plains tribes for food and fur, the role as a meat source through drought and depression, and at the end the 1932 rodeo. On the reverse is a recipe. It opens by telling the cook to catch the rabbit first, and ends with dumplings. In 2004 the town scattered 37 painted six foot jackrabbits around Odessa in a project called the Jackrabbit Jamboree, and 31 can still be found.