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Hunter next to sign at entrance of Cornell University
Colleges and universities have their hands full when it comes to preventing their students from making questionable decisions on campus. That includes Cornell, which was forced to update its housing rulebook thanks to some hunters who decided to break down a bear carcass inside one of its dorms.
Cornell University is one of the eight prestigious learning institutions that comprise the Ivy League, and its student body boasts around 16,000 undergraduates who primarily live on the campus located in the town of Ithaca in upstate New York.
The school is located at the bottom of one of the Finger Lakes and surrounded by tens of thousands of acres of forests where hunters are permitted to track down various game.
There is a fairly short window if you want to use a gun to legally bag a black bear in the area, but you do have more time to work with in the northern and southern parts of the state where the season currently stretches from midway through September to the beginning of December.
Last year, some students at Cornell decided to take advantage of the opportunities at their disposal, and the school has tweaked its housing policies thanks to what unfolded after they managed to land one of those mammals.
Students at Cornell are no longer allowed to butcher wild animals in their dorms after hunters broke down a bear in a communal kitchen
The Cornell University Police Department received a very interesting call on the evening of September 7, 2025, as they were dispatched to Ganędagǫ: Hall, a dorm designed to “encourage interaction and collaboration among students,” due to concerns about a scene that unfolded in one of its communal kitchens.
The scene in question involved some students who’d killed a black bear before bringing it back to campus to break down the carcass on a tarp they laid down on a table in the kitchen to harvest the meat that was deposited in the freezer (some of which was reserved for the production of an unconventional pastrami).
Pictures of the operation quickly made the rounds on campus while causing a bit of a stir. However, the police were able to confirm the bear was killed by someone with a valid hunting license in an area where they were permitted to take it down, and the students successfully deployed the Air Bud defense by arguing there was no rule that said they couldn’t butcher a bear inside a dorm.
However, that is no longer the case, as there has been an update to Cornell’s Community Living Standards for Undergrads heading into the 2026-27 academic year. The “Cooking and Community Kitchens” section has a new clause that can be credited to The Bear Incident, as it now states “Processing wild/game animals in community kitchens is strictly prohibited.”
It was fun while it lasted.