As the UMaine Black Bears kick off their fall football season they’ve got a new form of mascot competition.
A couple of Cornell students dragged a black bear they’d killed while hunting this week back to their dorm room to skin it.
Though Cornell’s intercollegiate sports teams have no official mascot, fans have long embraced images of a bear, and a person wearing a bear suit decked out in Cornell gear is a regular sight prowling sidelines at Big Red football and basketball games.
A growling bear plays a star role in Cornell’s athletic imagery, and bears are all over school memorabilia.
Perhaps envious of UMaine’s having a black bear as a real mascot – and trying to make a black bear the official mascot also at Cornell – two students there brought the carcass of a 120-pound black bear back to their dorm, where they skinned and butchered the remains, officials said Thursday.
The two undergrads who had “valid New York State hunting licenses killed a bear lawfully over the weekend,” a Cornell spokesperson said in a statement.
The students then “brought the animal into a Cornell residence hall for processing on Saturday” before a “police report was made when a complaint was filed late Sunday night,” the school official said, adding that “no charges have been filed.”
An investigator with the NY Department of Environmental Conservation, which oversees hunting in that state, visited the school Sunday and found no code violations.
The Black Bears – the Maine version that is – lost their first game of the football season to William & Mary September 6.
Maybe for their next game they should bring in a live black bear or two to hype up the crowd.
Unlike at Cornell, in Orono the black bear lives.
Go Black Bears!
