Somewhere in Waco, Texas, on a street that used to be known for stolen car parts and discarded needles, a young man is being chased around his own yard by a six-foot flightless bird. He's laughing. He's bleeding a little. And a few million people are watching it happen.
That's Ben Christie — Uncle Farmer Dad Ben, as the internet calls him — founder of the Urban Rescue Ranch and, as of this writing, one of the most improbable wildlife rehabilitators in Central Texas. He's a Baylor University alumnus from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who was supposed to go work in enterprise software sales. Instead, he bought a condemned crack house, spent thousands of hours pulling tires and car parts and actual needles out of the dirt, and turned three acres of Waco blight into a certified wildlife rehabilitation facility and farm sanctuary. Oh, and he did most of it on camera, for millions of people who can't get enough of watching Kevin the rhea try to murder him.
It Started with Chickens at Baylor
The origin story, like most good Texas stories, begins with someone doing something they probably shouldn't have. Senior year at Baylor, Christie got a case of senioritis and responded by buying a flock of chicks and ducklings from Tractor Supply. "My one roommate had a dog that kept pooping in my closet," he's said in interviews, "and I told him I could literally get a whole flock of birds and they would all poop less than your dog." He was wrong about the poop math, but right that he'd found something he genuinely loved.
He had a job lined up at Oracle in Austin after graduation. He took it. But the side project — a ramshackle backyard operation with chickens and ducks in an Austin rental — kept growing. Injured animals started appearing. People brought him squirrels with broken legs, possums that fell from trees, birds that flew into windows. A TikTok account called @ostrichplug accumulated millions of followers almost by accident. By early 2021, he was seriously weighing whether to quit the software sales desk and do this thing full time.
Then Winter Storm Uri hit.
Three Days Without Power and a Prayer That Changed Everything
February 2021. The freeze that killed plants in Galveston, burst pipes across Dallas, and left millions of Texans without heat. Christie sat in his Austin house with no power and no water for three days, keeping his animals alive as best he could, and prayed. "I just prayed during those three days, asking God to tell me what I'm supposed to do with my life, why I'm here and if I should focus on this social media thing," he later told the Baylor Lariat.
The answer he got was yes. He left the Oracle job. He went looking for property in Waco — close to Baylor, close to community, far enough from Austin to afford land. What he found was not exactly a dream property.
The YouTube channel bio says it straight: "I bought a crackhouse and dump and turned it into a certified wildlife rehabilitation facility and farm sanctuary for exotic (hunted) livestock in central Texas." The property had been a chop shop — stolen cars cut up and sold for parts — and the lot behind it had served as an informal landfill for decades. At one point Christie and volunteers hauled out roughly eighty tires. Seventy-plus hours just cleaning trash. The original house had rotted base plates, questionable wiring, and a foundation that listed visibly. Christie moved in anyway, sleeping there while fixing it up.
"It took at least 70 hours to clean up all the trash on this property and we are still doing it," he said on camera, laughing the specific laugh of someone who has accepted that this is now their life. "For those of you that are new, this used to be a crack house and a car shop. They would cut up old cars that were probably stolen and sell them for parts."
Kevin, the Bird Who Cannot Be Reasoned With
There is no understanding the Urban Rescue Ranch without first understanding Kevin.
Kevin is a greater rhea — a large South American ratite that looks like a smaller, grumpier cousin of the ostrich. Most rheas are docile. Kevin is not. A farm had him slated for euthanasia because of his abnormal aggression. Christie took him in. Kevin has not once demonstrated gratitude. He attacks Ben. He attacks strangers. He attacks pool noodles, fence posts, lights, and the general concept of peace. Fans mailed riot shields. Someone sent a nerf sword. Christie has tried pool noodles (his primary defensive weapon, slapping Kevin on the head without hurting him) and screaming (surprisingly effective). Nothing fully works. "I don't even feel pain anymore, you guys," Christie said after yet another biting incident. "Nothing is worse than working on a project for three hours straight and then all of it just goes to nothing —" though in Kevin's case it usually means going to blood.
Kevin married Karen, a female rhea who is everything Kevin is not: calm, friendly, a devoted mother, and deeply fond of hot dogs — "glizzies" in the ranch's evolving internal vocabulary. Karen will eat glizzies right from Ben's hand. Kevin uses that same hand as a chew toy. Together they had children. The oldest, Soulja Boy, appeared to have a gentler temperament right up until 2024, when he entered what the ranch's fan wiki documented as his villain arc and became, by multiple accounts, worse than his father. Kevin himself was eventually deposed by Soulja Boy's coup and now lives alone near the perimeter enclosures.
The Cast: DaBaby, Homelander, Gimpy, and the Others
The Urban Rescue Ranch runs on internet-era naming conventions and dead-serious care. Almost every animal has a name — usually a meme, a rapper, or an extremely online reference — and gets treated with genuine expertise.
DaBaby is a red kangaroo Christie rescued from a canned hunting ranch in Texas — the kind of operation that charges customers to shoot exotic animals inside a fenced perimeter. Christie drove out and brought him home. "Whoa, is that hit rapper and artist DaBaby?" became the announcement every time the kangaroo appeared on screen.
Homelander arrived as an ostrich chick with badly curled toes and splayed legs — conditions that, untreated, would have crippled him. Christie built custom splints, did daily physical therapy, and documented every step. "This is what all those years of working was for," he said once, with Homelander nibbling on his overalls. "All the work, all the days sleeping in that crack house — all the time and money and hours spent building all this was just for homelander. Just so he could nibble on my overalls." Homelander grew into a large, healthy ostrich.
Gimpy was a duckling with swimmer syndrome — her legs splayed out instead of holding her upright, leaving her to move in a sliding crawl. A TikTok viewer spotted the condition in the comments when Gimpy was still a tiny baby. Christie started physical therapy and leg taping immediately. "Because we caught it early enough she's developed a lot better," he said on camera. "She's doing super, super well. We love her." Gimpy walked. That's the kind of sentence that makes people subscribe.
Big Ounce and the Prairie Dog Kingdom of Ouncetopia
Prairie dogs are supposed to be small. Big Ounce was not receiving that memo. Rescued in early 2022, and described in the fan wiki as formally named Biggerton Ouncerton III, Big Ounce became the undisputed mascot of the whole operation. He'd run up to Christie for attention, then go into a profound, slightly alarming sleep when petted. Ben developed a recurring bit where Big Ounce appeared to die, then resurrected. Millions of people went along with it every single time.
In mid-November 2023, Big Ounce died of old age. The grief online was real and disproportionate in the most wonderful way. Shortly after, Christie posted a quiet video and said: "Unk's going to be taking a little break from posting for a while. I don't know how long, but I am really, really burnt out. So if you could please pray for me, it would mean a lot. 'Cause even though we're doing so much and I always seem so happy, Unk be going through a lot off camera. It ain't easy being cheesy."
Montgomery the Zebra: The Watermelon Diplomacy Era
At some point on the timeline — and the Urban Rescue Ranch's timeline is less a linear narrative than a fever dream — a zebra named Montgomery arrived. The ranch's lore deepened considerably. Montgomery had a blanket he was extremely attached to. He also had strong opinions about watermelons. "You just have to throw a watermelon at him," Christie explained on camera. "And I will not be bested by a zebra. When your zebra gets big enough to throw whole watermelons at him and it don't even hurt him — all he knows when daddy picks the watermelon up, that means I need a little space." The watermelon became established ranch policy.
Montgomery also had an affinity for fire. After Christie started a small burn pile one evening, Montgomery stood near it all night. "I don't know if this is a donkey thing, a horse thing, or a zebra thing," Christie mused, watching him. It's a zebra thing, apparently. Or at least a Montgomery thing.
Beavers, Coyotes, Otters, and Everything Else That Showed Up
Once Christie got his official Texas wildlife rehabilitation permit, the intake volume got biblical. A beaver with a bowfishing arrow embedded in the scruff of its neck, dropped off by someone who found it at Lake Waco after a flood. A full-grown, narcoleptic otter — found approaching golfers at a Waco country club and falling asleep at their feet — that staff caught at 1 a.m. while Christie was in Indonesia. Baby raccoons in batches, baby squirrels not yet old enough to open their eyes, screech owls, kestrels, a great blue heron, a bobcat, an armadillo, a skunk named Pepe Le Pew, a crow named Fortnite. A nutria living temporarily in the bathroom tub. "We've got six ducks, two beavers, fifty possums, a ton of squirrels, we just released five rabbits... and an eastern screech owl," Christie catalogued in one video, sounding mildly surprised by his own inventory.
The coyotes are a recurring thread. Christie has released five of them back to the wild. "I could release this guy back to the wild like the last five coyotes that we've raised here," he said once, watching a young one he'd rehabbed. "It seems like everybody in Texas just loves to shoot them." The frustration was real. He released it anyway.
The capybaras — Gort and Quandale Dingle, who arrived in June 2022 — became permanent fixtures. They swim and poop in the ponds. They trim the grass like a golf course. Christie kisses the youngest, Kumala, directly on the lips. "His breath's pretty stinky," he noted on camera. The comment section treated this as deeply important news.
The Faith That Built It
Christie ends nearly every video the same way: "Oh, I almost forgot to tell you" — pause — scripture of the day. Sometimes a specific verse. Sometimes just "all of Ecclesiastes." It's never preachy. It's planted at the end like a punctuation mark.
He talks about faith the way he talks about everything: briefly, with more honesty than you expect. "It really is amazing what the good Lord above can do," he said during one video while looking at the property — which had, two years prior, been buried under decades of someone else's trash. "A: anything is possible with a good Lord helping you. And B: you can do this too."
He's a full-time grad student while running the ranch. He leads at his church in multiple capacities. "Pastors don't make a ton of money," he mentioned once, with a dry aside, "unless they're cringe — and not the good kind of cringe, like old Uncle Ben." He prays for his viewers. He asks for prayers back. "I still pray for you guys almost every night," he told his audience once. "I love you guys. I appreciate you."
🐢 What Uncle Ben Actually Built
The Urban Rescue Ranch operates as Waco Wildlife Rescue, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. By 2024 it had 3 million YouTube subscribers and 4.2 million TikTok followers. Baylor students volunteer there. Animals come in from across Central Texas. The ranch fills a genuine gap — by its own accounting, there are no large wildlife rehab facilities for hundreds of miles in any direction. The crack house got fixed: new base plates, actual running water (Christie celebrated this milestone on camera), insulation, a working bathroom. He built a second structure for his home and converted the original house into the rehab office.
It's the kind of thing that, described on paper, sounds improbable. A former sales rep. A condemned Waco property. A rhea that hates everyone. A zebra with a watermelon arrangement. Capybaras in a former chop shop yard. Baby beavers nursed back to health in a bathroom tub. Thousands of hours of viewer donations funding a flight pen large enough to legally rehabilitate bald eagles. His friend's neighbor Tank helped with foundation work and got his own fan following.
"Without you guys and your support, none of this would have happened," Christie told his viewers once, looking at the ponds, the enclosures, the fruit trees. "And B: you can do this too. I got a really cheap property and … anything is possible with a good Lord helping you."
Kevin remains unimpressed.
Drive down the right street in Waco on a Tuesday afternoon and you can spot an ostrich through the fence. If you happen to see a guy running across the yard waving a pool noodle — that's Uncle Farmer Ben, and he's fine. Could your hometown absorb its own Urban Rescue Ranch, or does it take a very specific flavor of Texan stubbornness to make something like this work?
Follow Uncle Farmer Ben on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheUrbanRescueRanch
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