Arkansas State Fair Livestock Show: Parents Build $38,000 Bunny Gym
Little Rock Parents Spend Like Defense Contractors on a Contest Whose Athletes Weigh Four Pounds
LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas — Any honest account of the Arkansas State Fair Livestock Show ought to begin with the beef cattle, the market lambs, the dairy goats and the gilts, and this one will, for exactly one sentence, because this year the serious money went somewhere else: the bunny hopping contest, in which rabbits jump over small wooden rails while adults pretend not to care.
The contest is real. A fair that, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, began in 1938 as a livestock exposition now lists it beside the rabbit meat pen and single fryer class, and for years it was the gentlest event on the grounds. A child set a rabbit at the start, the rabbit considered the first rail, and everyone clapped whether it jumped or not.
Then, according to a volunteer who has worked the rabbit barn for nineteen years and asked not to be named “because I still have to sit behind these people at church,” somebody’s father bought a stopwatch.
The Arms Race Began With a $14 Stopwatch and Ended With a Rabbit Gym Needing a Building Permit
The stopwatch came from a sporting goods store in Conway. Within a month a family near Benton had answered it with a laser timing gate. A Cabot family answered the laser gate with two laser gates and a tablet that graphed something it called “hop velocity.” By spring a Jonesboro mother had commissioned a regulation hopping course in a converted shop building, with rubber flooring, adjustable aluminum rails, a ventilation system rated for a commercial kitchen, and speakers playing a nature-documentary soundtrack on a loop “to keep the athletes calm.”
Farm.FM obtained the contractor’s itemized estimate. The total was $38,412. Line items included “rail set, competition grade, anodized” ($2,900), “climate package” ($11,000), “athlete recovery mat” ($640), “consultation, lagomorph performance” ($3,500) and “contingency” ($4,000), which the contractor explained was “for when she wants it moved.”
The athlete in question is a Mini Rex valued, by the most generous breeder in northeast Arkansas, at about $40.
“We don’t think of it as spending,” the Jonesboro mother said. “We think of it as building a program.”
Her daughter, 12, was asked what she thought of the program. “I think he’d jump better if everybody stopped watching him,” she said. “He gets self-conscious. So do I.”
Arkansas 4-H Families Hire a Hopping Coach, Then a Second Coach to Supervise the First
By June the coach had arrived, from either Tennessee or “a website.” The coach charges $85 an hour, wears a whistle, and has introduced terminology the rabbits do not recognize, including “approach discipline,” “takeoff commitment” and “the mental game.”
A Searcy father, unwilling to lose ground, hired a second coach whose only job is to watch film of the first coach and identify weaknesses. The two coaches now communicate exclusively through the Searcy father, who has updated his social media profile to read “Executive, Rabbit Sports.”
Then came team polo shirts, embroidered with the rabbit’s name on the front and a sponsor on the back. The sponsor was the father’s own insurance agency. He paid himself for the placement.
Consider the setting. According to the University of Arkansas agriculture profile, it ranks first in the nation in rice, third in broilers, third in upland cotton and fourth in both turkeys and catfish. None of those figures involve a rabbit clearing a rail.
A coalition of families petitioned the livestock office for video replay. The office replied with one sentence: “The rabbit either went over it or it did not.” The families called the response “unprofessional.” One father has filed an appeal.
Meanwhile, on the Grand Prairie, a Girl, a Rabbit and a Rice Levee
The winner came from none of these programs. She is an 11-year-old 4-H member from the Grand Prairie, the rice country east of Little Rock, where every field is laced with levees, the low earthen ridges that hold the water in. Her rabbit, Biscuit, is a Holland Lop of no recorded pedigree.
Her training method, in full: in March she set Biscuit on one side of a dry levee and a leaf of romaine on the other. “He wanted the lettuce,” she said. “That’s the whole method.” Her season budget was one head of lettuce a week for thirty weeks at $1.89 a head, or $56.70. She kept the receipts in her record book, alphabetized.
On contest day the Jonesboro rabbit, accustomed to recorded birdsong, heard a live crowd and refused to leave the start. The Searcy rabbit looked at the first coach, looked at the second coach, looked at the Searcy father in his embroidered polo, and lay down. The Cabot rabbit cleared every rail flawlessly, then turned around and hopped back to the start to stand beside its tablet, the most loyal thing anyone had ever seen an animal do for electronics.
Biscuit cleared every rail and ate the clover decoration on the judges’ table.
The Arkansas State Fair Livestock Show Office Opens a Levee Inquiry
Within the hour, three families had requested a formal inspection of the levee. A Cabot father asked the livestock office whether a levee constituted “an unregulated training facility.” The volunteer explained that a levee is dirt. The father asked who certified the dirt. The volunteer went to lunch.
By the weekend, two of the families had contacted Grand Prairie rice farmers about renting levee time for next season. One farmer quoted them $200 an hour. Asked why so high when levees are, in fact, dirt, he said, “Because I met them.”
The Jonesboro facility is now listed for sale as a “turnkey performance center, suitable for rabbits or a very ambitious hamster.” Biscuit is back on the levee, uncoached and undefeated.
The next Arkansas State Fair Livestock Show opens in Little Rock in October, and the rabbit barn volunteer says she is bracing for drones. “Somebody always has to escalate,” she said. “The kids never do. The kids just want to know if the rabbit had a nice time.”
Five Humorous Observations About Arkansas 4-H and FFA Livestock Shows
- A family spent $38,412 on a facility for a $40 rabbit. That is not a hobby. That is a rabbit with a mortgage and nobody told the rabbit.
- The Searcy father hired a coach to coach the coach. The only person in that family without a management structure is the 12-year-old, and she’s the only one who knows the rabbit’s birthday.
- The winning training program cost $56.70 and was documented in alphabetical order. The losing programs cost more than a combine payment and were documented on a tablet the rabbit loved more than its owner.
- Arkansas leads the nation in rice, and the most valuable piece of agricultural infrastructure at the fair this year turned out to be one dry levee and a leaf of romaine.
- A grown man asked who certified the dirt. On the Grand Prairie that question gets you a long silence, a short answer and a rental rate of $200 an hour.
Farm Satire Disclaimer
This is farm satire from Farm.FM. The coaches, the laser gates and the $38,412 rabbit gym are exaggerated for laughs, but the bunny hopping contest, the Arkansas State Fair and the young exhibitors are real and deserve your applause. Farm and ranch satire is a rural survival skill: when the rain comes a week late, the rice price drops and the feed bill arrives the same afternoon, a farm family either laughs at the coffee shop or cries in the pickup. Most choose the coffee shop. The coffee is better.