Cornell bans bear butchering in dorm kitchens after 2025 uproar

Cornell University has formally banned students from butchering wild game in shared dormitory kitchens, closing the loop on a controversy that began last fall when two students carried a dead black bear into a residence hall to skin it.

The addition to Cornell’s Community Living Standards for the 2026-27 academic year states plainly: “Processing wild/game animals in community kitchens is strictly prohibited.”

A university spokesperson confirmed to the Cornell Daily Sun, the campus’s independent student newspaper, that the change was a direct response to the September 2025 episode in Ganedago Hall, an undergraduate residence on Cornell’s North Campus. School officials said the update was meant to spell out what is and isn’t allowed in a communal kitchen, rather than to ban hunting or game meat outright.

The incident that prompted the rule began Sept. 6, 2025, the opening day of New York’s early firearms bear season, when two Cornell undergraduates legally killed an adult black bear roughly two hours from campus, in a hunting zone the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation designates Region 4. Rather than take the carcass to a friend’s house as planned, the students brought it back to Ganędagǫ Hall and processed it on the communal kitchen table after the friend had a last-minute emergency.

Photos of the bear’s remains and meat stored in the dorm’s shared refrigerator spread quickly on Reddit and Sidechat, an anonymous campus social platform, drawing national attention and backlash from some students over sanitation and the propriety of field-dressing game in a dorm.

Cornell University Police fielded a complaint the following weekend, but no criminal charges were filed, and the university’s Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards determined the students hadn’t broken any existing rules at the time. The kitchen was closed for cleaning and reopened within days. New York’s DEC also sent an investigator, who, according to NBC News, found no code violations tied to the hunt itself.

One of the two students, Aaron Chin, a mechanical engineering major, publicly identified himself about a month later on an October 2025 episode of the MeatEater Podcast, hosted by Steven Rinella. Mr. Chin, who also serves as a volunteer firefighter and an Army ROTC cadet at Cornell, said he and his hunting partner had tried to stay within the rules as they understood them. “We made sure we did everything by the book,” he told Rinella.

Both students held valid New York hunting licenses, and neither faced university discipline. The new kitchen provision leaves hunting and game meat on campus otherwise untouched — students who hunt must still register their firearms with Cornell University Police, who grant them round-the-clock access to retrieve them.