It was last September when something seemingly anachronistic took place on an Ivy League college campus as a pair of Cornell undergrads (legally) killed a black bear and hauled it back to residence. It was there that they then proceeded to process the animal and unknowingly open a can of worms that would soon include a complaint and corresponding investigation by campus police and New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation.
The bear, which was reportedly in the 150-200-pound range, was legally shot on the opening day of New York’s early firearms bear season after Aaron Chin (Class of ‘27) and a buddy set up on a piece of public land in DEC Region 4. The students said they had originally planned to clean the bear up at a friend’s place near campus, but plans changed at the last minute. With a fresh kill on hand, the two students quickly pivoted plans and took the bear carcass to the communal kitchen area in Ganędagǫ: Hall on North Campus, laid it out on a camo tarp, skinned it, butchered it, bagged the meat, labeled the packages, and stored it in the shared freezer.
It wasn’t long before photos started to make their rounds on Reddit and social media, prompting officials from both the school and the state to have a closer look at what went on with the neatly processed bear on Cornell’s campus. Outside of mandating a deep clean in the communal kitchen, investigators could find no crimes committed. Both students held valid licenses, the bear was taken legally and even Cornell’s Office of Student Conduct determined they had not violated the Student Code of Conduct or the existing Community Living Standards.
Despite the clean kill, Cornell recently announced some preemptive measures they hope will deter students from doing something similar as this year’s hunting seasons approach. In an effort to close the loophole, the school has since updated their Community Living Standards for the 2026-27 academic year. Of notable changes, they now state that “processing wild/game animals in community kitchens is strictly prohibited.”
A spokeswoman said the change was meant “to provide clarity regarding what is or is not appropriate to do in a communal kitchen space.” Students are still free to store and cook already-processed game meat and hunters can still register firearms with campus police and retrieve them as needed. But the actual work of turning a dead animal into food is no longer allowed inside the residential halls.
Now, on one level, you can certainly understand the impulse. A communal kitchen is a shared space and not every roommate or floor-mate wants to walk in on a half-skinned bear. Sanitation concerns are real and it’s obvious that the university is trying to head off future conflicts before they start.
But in other ways, this is not really a story about one kitchen rule at one school.
It is a small, vivid example of a much larger and perhaps concerning pattern.
College students who hunt are already up against a quiet obstacle course. Understandably, the vast majority of dorms ban firearms in the rooms, and while some schools offer locked storage with campus police, many do not—or make the process so cumbersome that students end up scrambling for off-campus options. For students who might be living two states away from home, this adds logistical complexity that many 18/19-year-olds have a hard time managing once seasons open.
In the event that the storage issue gets solved, as we’ve learned, processing space is almost non-existent. As a result, many students end up missing or forgoing entire seasons not because they lost interest, but because the practical barriers are stacked against them. The same institutions that will happily host a lecture on “sustainable food systems” often make it nearly impossible for a student to actually harvest and handle their own meat.
We all love to give Zoomers shit about being glued to their phones and being disconnected from the real world, which, in some ways, holds a bit of truth. But perhaps a bigger reason they are sucked into their phones is that the adults in charge have steadily banned or restricted the very activities that used to pull young people outdoors and into practical competence.
We in the outdoors community ought to treat this as more than just some quirky campus story. For those of us (including state-level R3 coordinators) who are watching the decline in license sales among 18-24-year-olds in realtime, perhaps breaking down bureaucratic gauntlets should be a focus.
Yes, there will always be some that will “find a way” to get afield. I know I would. But when schools and other institutions continue to write new rules that make the next version of a story like this against policy, it just feels like another small door quietly closing in the fight to keep hunting alive amongst the younger generation.
