Two unidentified Cornell University students caught some attention from their peers over the weekend for skinning and butchering a black bear in their communal dorm kitchen. A police report was filed and a game warden came to investigate, but according to a university spokesperson, the students received no charges because they’d hunted the bear legally and didn’t break any school rules.
The Cornell Daily Sun was the first to break news of the incident, which took place Saturday at Ganędagǫ Hall. School officials confirmed the details, including the lack of charges, with several national news outlets Thursday. NBC News reports that the Cornell University Police Department first received a report about the bear butchering late Saturday night, and that an investigator with the New York Department of Environmental Conservation visited the residence hall Sunday.
By that point, news of the incident had spread quickly around campus. It had already been shared on various social media pages and subreddits, including on a Cornell parent’s page, where many users were already questioning the legality of the students’ actions. Photos shared to Facebook showed the partially skinned carcass on top of a camouflage tarp, and some of the meat already broken down and stored in plastic bags in the communal freezer.
“Today, nearly everyone I’ve spoken with has talked about the bear-skinning,” one Cornell senior told The Ithaca Voice Monday.
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Regardless of the accusations that were made online, the DEC investigator who visited campus Sunday found no evidence of any wildlife violations, and they determined that the students had taken the bear legally in New York’s Region 4 with the proper tags. Region 4 covers several counties in the northern Catskills and it lies to the east of Region 7, where Cornell is located. Region 4’s early firearms black bear hunting season opened Saturday, Sept. 6.
The investigator also reported that the black bear weighed roughly 120 pounds, according to statements from school officials. This is on the smaller size, but not that small by East Coast standards, and New York does not have any minimum size requirements for black bears. (State regulations do prohibit the taking of cubs, however.) At the same time, Cornell’s Student Code of Conduct does not address the transportation and/or processing of animal carcasses on campus, according to The Ithaca Voice.
Bears have a symbolic status at the Ivy League school. Which could explain why the incident spread so quickly around campus. Cornell’s unofficial mascot is a Big Red Bear named “Touchdown,” and a growling bruin is at the center of the school’s athletic logos. This history goes back to 1915, when the university first started using a live black bear as a football mascot. Cornell continued this tradition on-and-off for a couple decades and brought in a few different animals as replacements. But there were reportedly several incidents with the bears, including at least one escapee and a kidnapping attempt by Harvard.