By now, you have probably heard about the controversy concerning the impending slaughter of de facto campus mascots, Bill and Lou, 11 year-old oxen who have been denied the chance to live out their retirement at a sanctuary. What you may not know is that the process by which the decision to kill Bill and Lou was made in a manner that endangered student well-being at Green Mountain College and has diminished the value of a Green Mountain College degree.
There’s a reason that the drinking age is 21. The frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex—the part of the brain responsible for assessing the consequences of actions—hasn’t finished growing until then. Teen-agers are literally unable to accurately estimate the consequences of drinking several shots of liquor in succession. Why would we ask them to accurately estimate the consequences of killing two animals? No responsible parent would ask a teen-ager to determine whether to euthanize a family pet, leaving them with the emotional burden of a life-or-death decision. And, certainly, no responsible parent would ask a teen-ager to make such a decision while withholding vital information relevant to that decision.
But that’s exactly what has happened at Green Mountain College. Immature students have been asked to decide the fate of these animals and to live with the emotional burden of so doing. Furthermore, students have been unwittingly steered toward the “kill” decision. Now that a small subset of students have made the decision to kill, all students have been subjected to heavy peer, faculty, and even administrative pressure to support that decision.
The consequences will be significant. Of course, the oxen themselves will pay the highest price, losing out on years of peace, ease, and friendship at an animal sanctuary. But the school and the students also will suffer.
Animal Welfare at Green Mountain College
All of the school’s students—not just the small sub-set who made the decision to kill and have since claimed that they speak for the entire student body—will have to live with the emotional reverberations of killing two beloved animals who did not want to die, deliberately depriving them of the free retirement home in defiance of a literally worldwide cry for mercy.
All students—including students who cared for Bill and Lou and did not want them to die—will have to grapple with the emotions of seeing “Bill and Lou burgers” on the menu at the school cafeteria.
Those students who do eat hamburgers will be expected—for several months—to consume 11 year-old oxen meat, which will be technically edible, but not at all palatable. Meat is muscle. As they age, muscles become more striated. They become even more so if the muscles are used strenuously, as those of work oxen have been. This will be stringy, grisly meat of the kind usually used in pet food.
All of which is to say, we expect significant crying and retching in the cafeteria on the first day that those burgers are served. And then what? The students who made the decision should be ethically obligated to consume that one ton of barely edible meat. But will they? If not, what then?
Students did not anticipate that likely outcome not only because of their age but also because they were provided with biased “information” in the deliberation process. The faculty member who conceived of the idea of killing the oxen slanted the information given to students in order to favor that decision. After the original decision was protested, other faculty members stepped in to protect students from information from outside sources, thereby steering them toward confirming the original decision.
The actions of these faculty members, and the shoddy reasoning in the rationales they have put forward for the slaughter, have significantly lowered Green Mountain College’s reputation within academia. This will lower the value of your child’s degree. Both publicly and privately, prestigious scholars in relevant fields have urged the Provost and President to reconsider the decision, or at least stop claiming that it is in any way consistent with environmental ethics or respect for animal welfare.
Pictures of animal cruelty at Green Mountain College are circulating online, further lowering the reputation of the school. National media stories and an online video feature Green Mountain College students making callous comments and offering illogical rationales for the killing. All of these are evidence that Green Mountain College teaches callousness toward animals while failing to teach students basic skills such as how to construct a rational argument without falling into fallacy.
Grave concerns about animal welfare at the college have emerged in the course of this controversy. Concerns about the academic credibility of the school’s farm program—which is managed by a faculty member with scant experience and no relevant degrees—also have arisen. All of this evidence will be brought up to challenge the accreditation of the college if it does not act immediately and affirmatively to review and improve its animal welfare policies.
If your student is in the farm program, you should know: She or he is not receiving instruction consistent with 21st century animal welfare policies. She or he is being instructed by a farm manager who lacks academic credentials in the area of agriculture, animal science, or any other related field. She or he is learning out-dated techniques and stereotyped ideas rather than the innovative ideas and practices endorsed by actual experts in the field of sustainable agriculture.
Use your voice as a tuition-paying parent. Tell the President of Green Mountain College to issue an immediate reprieve for Bill and Lou, allowing them to retire to VINE Sanctuary. Demand a thorough review of the farm program, with particular attention to the credentials of staff members charged with the responsibility of teaching students how to care for animals. Whatever your son or daughter might believe, ask that the school respect the rights of all students, protecting those with minority views from bullying and refraining from subjecting minors to the stress of making life-or-death decisions.
Sincerely,
pattrice jones
Cofounder, VINE Sanctuary
p.s. If your child is a vegan or simply feels sympathy for animals, you should know: She or he may have been bullied or subjected to intense peer pressure at Green Mountain College. You may want to check in about that. If your child is one of the many former vegetarians now saying that they will be happy to eat Bill and Lou, you may want to inquire about the process by which she has been led to set her previous ideals and ideas aside in favor of those of the farm manager and his crew.
The factory farms use those same arguments. There’s always something worse to point to, or some economic rationalization, or some narrow argument about sustainability or independence, when you need to ease your own conscience.
What’s missing is simple compassion.
I have seen no bullying on campus. I’m not denying that it does exist, however, if it does, it is very rare. GMC is a small community, and things such as bullying tend to be seen very easily. Although I must say, Pattrice, that I along with other members of GMC feel bullied by you and people like you. You are trying to slander the name of the college, its faculty, staff and students, when we’re just trying to be sustainable and use local humane meat rather than contribute to horrible factory farms. I am 20 years old, and I feel personally offended that you would call students like me immature. You complain about faculty of the farm not being qualified (which they are) yet you present no psychology or sociology while you make all of these claims about us being brainwashed.
The fact is, there have been many GMC animals that were slaughtered and served in the dining hall, and there has never been a single complaint about it. You can’t force everyone in the world to stop eating meat. If you did, that would be bullying in the extreme. The least we can do is to make sure meat eaters eat sustainably, without wasting time, gas and money to procure factory farm, inhumanely treated animals.
Please stop trying to slander this school. It is filled with such wonderful people, vegetarian, vegan and meat eater who all want to do their part to help this planet on its path to local food and sustainability. Instead put your effort into ending factory farms, like so many of us at GMC are trying to do.
I mean that sincerely. I understand that you feel bullied. It cannot be a good feeling to know that literally tens of thousands of people have signed petitions expressing their repugnance with the decision and imploring you to change your mind.
What I cannot understand is the close-minded refusal to even consider the possibility that your reasoning might have been off or that the facts with which you worked when making the decision might not have been complete.
What I cannot understand is how a college –a college– can essentially put its fingers in its ears and just keep saying “because we said so! because we said so!” as not only citizens but prominent scholars in all of the relevant fields –ethology, ethics, environmental studies, animal studies, and more– implore you to reconsider.
Slander is something that isn’t true. Nothing I have written isn’t true. Are you upset that the reputation of the college has been diminished? Then look at the behavior that led that to happen. Change the behavior that led that to happen.
Start by re-examining the spurious logic that so many scholars have challenged. For example, some students seem to think something like this, “we are against factory farming, so whatever we do with Bill and Lou is OK.” That would be the logical fallacy known as a non sequitor. It would be like a man saying, “I donate money to a battered women’s shelter, so it’s OK if I hit my wife just once.”
Another common, but spurious, argument seems to be, “factory farms do worse things to animals, so we cannot justly be criticized for anything we do to animals.” Another non sequitor. What factory farms do is not relevant to the question of whether what you do, or propose to do, is ethical.
Furthermore, the fact that more beings are suffering or some being is suffering more somewhere else does not relieve a neighbor of the obligation to attend to the suffering next door. If I suspect that my neighbor is neglecting her child, I will not refuse to intervene because children are starving elsewhere.
As for unqualified faculty. The CV of Farm Manager Mulder is online. You can see for yourself whether he has any academic qualifications relevant to his job.
On the question of physical maturity and consequent cognitive maturity, I cannot bear to type the facts about the brain another time. Look them up yourself.
THIS REPLY HAS BEEN BACK-DATED SO THAT IT WILL APPEAR RIGHT AFTER THE COMMENT TO WHICH IT APPLIES
What I do have a huge problem with is animals being used to ease the burden of labor for mankind or used to make money for mankind and are then discarded without any mind to repayment for years of hard work. I have a problem with those who do not care for thier animals properly or train them properly and who do not retire them to a peaceful life after their hard work. Yes, Some don’t make it. I have seen it with my own eyes.
In this case, Bill and Lou were NOT raised as meat animals but as work animals. After years of giving their labor they should not be sent to slaughter and placed on a platter. I was not aware the Green Mountain was at a loss for meat – there is a grocery store nearby I am sure.
So to all those who choose to call people names you have shown yor inability to think logically, intelligently and above all to have respect…for human or animal.
I applaude those people like the good folks at VINE for speaking up for those who cannot speak for themselves.
http://www.facebook.com/maxxhockenberry?fref=ts
At the time we downloaded the photo from this GMC student’s Facebook page, the page included numerous other pictures of the same young man, clearly taken on the GMC campus.
Bill and lou are great and beautiful animals. But the hard truth is that not everyone is vegan, and there will be some need to depend on the work of animals in agriculture. Perhaps things will change, but we wont get anywhere unless some god-mend compromise can happen. Believe in what you believe, Stand your ground and cry out to the world against what you despise. But ideals wont be met if people are just digging themselves deeper and deeper into close-mindedness and nonacceptance. Im not saying its just you or just me, Im saying that people need to work together to bring this world to a new dawn of prosperity and joyous freedom. just Shake hands and fight the common enemy, at least for now.
Any decision ever made has had people on both sides of what is moral or right. Bill and Lou are not just serving the base needs of consumption. They are the catalysts in a movement to take away these murdering death camps across the world. They symbolize how we can break our dependence on the greed-ridden world of machines. Yes it is sad, yes they are loved, but through history there have been great martyrs. Bill and Lou are are great and beautiful animals. But the hard truth is that not everyone is vegan, and there will be some need to depend on the work of animals in agriculture. Perhaps things will change, but we wont get anywhere unless some god-mend compromise can happen. Believe in what you believe, Stand your ground and cry out to the world against what you despise. But ideals wont be met if people are just digging themselves deeper and deeper into close-mindedness and nonacceptance. Im not saying its just you or just me, Im saying that people need to work together to bring this world to a new dawn of prosperity and joyous freedom. just Shake hands and fight the common enemy.
First, I would like to say that I appreciate your effort at VINE Sanctuary to offer refuge to animals with no other place to call home. I believe that your offer to care for Bill and Lou comes from a genuine place of compassion and concern, and I agree in principle that Veganism (or Vegetarianism) might be the next evolution.
As a GMC parent, I read the open letter that you posted on the VINE blog. I must say that I am disappointed that your generalized assertions are not backed by tangible evidence; I expect at least that much in my daughter’s writing, a daughter who is the first to admit her frontal lobe has not fully grown. In what way have you measured GMC’s lowered standing within academia? Do you have empirical data to support this claim? Please remind me of a concrete example that GMC is instructing in methods counter to 21st century animal welfare policies. Which policies, specifically, are being violated? Do you have evidence of students being bullied? If so, it is your obligation to report this IMMEDIATELY to campus security; not to let it go in an open letter to parents on your blog, a blog many parents will not read. I have interacted with the security staff at GMC; they are compassionate, supportive, and discrete, good people, easy to approach. Please contact them at once with your concerns.
My daughter has been a vegetarian all of her life. She is currently mostly vegan, making some exceptions for local dairy. In middle school, my daughter joined an international effort to rescue Asian moon bears. She stops the car to escort turtles across the street and calls the police, waiting roadside for their arrival when the car in front of her strikes a bunny and drives away. This is a student who thinks deeply and philosophically about the connection that humans have to nature, and works toward making that connection more symbiotic. This is not a student who stands by or looks the other way in the face of controversy. Yet, this is a student who lives in a society where people eat meat and attends a school where meat is served in the cafeteria; that is our culture. If meat is going to be served, she is in full support of the students knowing and understanding from where it comes, and I am in full support of her ability to make that judgment.
Unless you are in a position to sway public opinion away from meat-eating with this single gesture, please allow Green Mountain College the respect to implement this decision, a decision that was not easy but one which they philosophically believe is just. Good people can and will philosophically disagree, and I suspect you will not stop fighting as long as Bill and Lou are alive. That is your right, but please don’t demonize the students or staff at GMC in your endeavor. This is a small academic community that has made a decision with which you disagree, an institution that is doing its best to teach young people about real world ethical dilemmas and sustainability.
Finally, I don’t know what to make of the “Animal Welfare at GMC” photo posted with the article. Not sure if it is tongue-in-cheek or a good example of the frontal lobe in transition, but it would not seem to me to represent the sentiment of the Green Mountain College community with respect to animal welfare. Have you seen the picture of the fire-truck called to campus to rescue a kitten from a tree as a crowd of students gathered, ready to help? Have you seen the multitude of GMC students sporting Facebook profile pictures and photos with their arms wrapped around dogs, horses, cows, kittens, bunnies, and other forms of wildlife? To suggest that one picture reflects the value the community places on animals is misleading. On that, I’m sure we can agree.
I hope you post my letter, and I am interested in hearing any reasoned argument that you have in response.
Wendy
Thank you very much for this thoughtful letter.
I don’t know whether you have waded through the many comments and my responses to them. I ask only because I have already addressed at least some of your concerns.
We do have empirical data to support every claim in the letter. What we hoped to do was to spark parents to ask their own questions of the school, rather than relying on us for their information.
You can visit the school’s website to see the CV of Farm Manager Mulder, whose degree is in mathematics and has no experience in farming other than a couple of years trying to run his own CSA. I personally have more agriculture experience than he but would never put myself forward as a college-level instructor in sustainable farming practices. More troubling, from our viewpoint as animal advocates, is that his only source of “expertise” concerning animals appears to be a brief stint volunteering with a non-profit that uses oxen to plow.
Which practices are not consistent with 21st century standards of animal welfare? Where to start? First, have a look at the farm’s own Facebook page. Does the mutilated sheep in the wheelbarrow seem to have been slaughtered in accordance with the federal Humane Slaughter Act? It’s true that that law does not cover poultry, but is that really an excuse for “slaughter days” at which any student can kill a chicken, just for fun?
We do know that the student with the dead chicken is a real GMC student who has posted vociferous defenses of the slaughter of Lou and Bill, along with that and other pictures of himself, on his Facebook page. We cannot know if that particular picture was taken on one of those slaughter days, but it seems a reasonable hypothesis.
The animal welfare movement in this country arose in part in response to practices like making animals walk endlessly on treadmills to power machinery. Maybe you remember some old-timey pictures of such cruelties. In the 21st century, of course, we have nifty devices like generators that can be attached to exercise bicycles to generate electricity while staying in shape. But Farm Manager Mulder and his crew made Lou and Bill trudge around to generate electricity.
It’s all very back-to-the-past — using an old-time buggy whip and old-style wooden yokes to make oxen plow. The students evidently groove on it, believing that they are learning real farming because this is consistent with storybook stereotypes. They don’t realize that local farmers –real farmers– are laughing at what one has called their “Playskool farm.” They will get a rude surprise upon graduation, when they learn that controlling oxen with a buggy whip is not a skill in high demand in the modern world.
You can look around online yourself, but reputable scholars who have expressed repugnance for GMC’s claim that the slaughter is in any way justified by environmental ethics or concern for animal welfare include Marc Bekoff (ethology, colleague of Jane Goodall–he has published condemnations of GMC on the Psychology Today website); James McWilliams (agrarian history–he has devoted considerable space to this on his own blog); Greta Gaard (ecofeminism and environmental studies); and Steve Wise (animal law–he has publicly expressed disgust at the utterances of GMC students and faculty, promising to make GMC a case study in spurious reasoning in his teaching). Others have written privately to the school, copying us.
I wish I had time to say more in response to your letter. I completely understand if you do not trust what I’ve written here. All that I ask is for you and other parents of GMC students to exercise due diligence now that you’ve had a “heads up” about possible problems at the school. Find out if I am right that asking young students to make an actual life or death decision is not consistent with ethics in academia. Decide for yourself whether the school ought to have subjected students to such stress, all the while depriving them of access to the full range of information relevant to the decision. Visit that farm program. Perhaps, like us, you will arrive to see a young calf with so many burrs embedded in his penis that he cannot urinate in a clear stream. Oh, no–that’s right– they already sold him. On Craigslist. Decide for yourself if a school that sells animals on Craigslist, all the while trumpeting its concern for animal welfare, might not be living up to its stated ideals.
We share many of those ideals, while also having some deep disagreements. We are not attacking GMC. We are calling for it to be what it purports to be.
Finally, in case you miss where I said this elsewhere, we took the step of writing a public letter only because all efforts to dialogue with the Provost and President about our grave concerns have gone unanswered. Our offers to come to campus to answer student questions or engage in reasoned debate have been ignored or refused. Our concerns are sincere. We knew no other way to make them heard.
I find it very interesting that saving the lives of two animals as “cherished” as Bill and Lou would be so difficult.
In fact, earlier this year, the sanctuary I work for took in two goats…one from a slaughterhouse. The owner of that facility – which profits off of slitting the throats of animals – had no qualms giving up the limping goat. He did not gather together the staff to discuss the ethical merits of relinquishing a goat to a shelter and sanctuary, shocking I know! A few years ago, a free-range pig farmer planned on slamming a runt piglet repeatedly against concrete until dead. Yet when a visitor offered to take the piglet…no one objected on grounds of “not sustainable!” or “piglet mine, I kill piglet”. The pig farmer didn’t convene a seminar with her staff, either.
How is it that a slaughterhouse operator and a pig farmer are capable of greater acts of compassion than a supposedly progressive school? That is unfathomable. And neither slaughterhouse operator or pig farmer knew these animals for 10+ years!
When given a choice between causing less harm and more, one should always choose the former. That this even needs to be a discussion when a kinder choice has been proffered (VINE Sanctuary) is surprising and a callous disregard of Lou and Bill’s welfare.
Unlike most GMC students, I have actually been in factory farms and rescued animals from them. For the first nine years of its existence, this sanctuary was located in the middle of poultry country, literally surrounded by factory farms. Also, we’re the ones who helped to popularize the term “factory farms.” It was an “extremist” like me –Jim Mason, author of Animal Factories– who coined the term. Both locally (when we were surrounded by factory farms) and internationally (when I coordinated an international coalition of environmental, social justice, and animal advocacy organizations devoted to opposing the globalization of industrial animal agriculture) we have, in fact, taken the fight to the factory farms.
But here’s a funny fact: Since relocating to Vermont, we find that the majority of animals who end up here –often because they have been seized by authorities due to extreme neglect, abuse, or other cruelty– come from small scale, supposedly sustainable, farms:
• Poncho and Jasper, seized from a small-scale dairy farm after being tied to a tractor and left to stave because the farmer had no economic use for them
• Coco and Midnight Moon, both seized from a small-scale, slaughter-on-site, beef farm — when authorities got there, Coco’s stall mate was already dead and Coco was in such bad shape that they seized him immediately; Midnight Moon came later, after the trial.
• Luna, Orchid, and Ory, all seized from a small-scale beef farm due to starvation
• Blake, Fennel, Rosetta, and Addison, all nearly starved to death at a small-scale dairy farm
• Too many chickens to name individually, from several small-scale egg operations where –just like on those factory farms– they were crowded together in ankle-deep excrement
That’s not even all of them. Just the ones who come to mind right now. You get the picture, I hope: Small-scale and sustainable does not equal cruelty-free. It just doesn’t.
How anyone could advocate the slaughter of such gentle giants is beyond my understanding. As a former meat eater, I am ashamed of my ignorance and apathy towards such sentient, loving, and gentle beings. We live in a culture of death, and many are proud of it. How shameful that we cannot get past our greed and blood lust. We – HUMANS – have no right to kill or eat any other creature on this planet. We are no better than they are. In fact, we are beneath most sentient beings on this planet, because we are heartless and cruel to those who have done nothing to harm us.
This whole situation sickens me to no end!
The calf sold on Craigslist was Gus. We have a screenshot of the listing. The assistant farm manager took the calls about him. She did not, in our view, make sufficient inquiries to ensure his ultimate welfare. However, she did insist that the buyer not reveal that he was purchased from GMC. We can back this up, as we can back up every assertion in this letter.
We also, by the way, have a picture of Gus at the farm with so many burrs deeply embedded around his penis that he could not urinate in a clear stream. Believe me, we have been moderate in the extreme in what we have chosen to say about animal welfare (or the lack thereof) at Green Mountain College. We are going public now only because every effort to work within the system has been rebuffed or ignored.
We exercised restraint while we were actively advocating for Bill and Lou in the hopes of at least managing to prevent those two from being slaughtered. And, no, we didn’t especially prefer that they come here. Any actual sanctuary run by animal welfare professionals with the resources to pay for top veterinary care would have been fine by us.
Now that it is clear that –as one GMC student commented on a previous post, “We are going to eat Bill and Lou and nothing anyone does or says will stop us.”– we see no particular reason to hold back the many things we have learned.
I personally have been appalled –sincerely shocked– by the behavior of GMC faculty members and administrators throughout this controversy. As an educator, I am mortified that students were put into the situation of making a life-or-death decision on the basis of incomplete information. Look it up yourself: No human subjects board would approve an experiment in which student subjects were asked to decide whether an animal is actually killed or not –and then actually have the animal killed if they voted that way, leaving the subjects with the emotional reverberations of the killing
If you can’t do that in a research setting, why in the world would any college administrator think it would be OK to do in real life? That is just not defensible behavior. Of course the students are going nuts over there — they’ve been put in an unbearably stressful situation. Not only were they asked to make the original decision, they have also been asked to shoulder the burden of sticking to the decision in the face of literally worldwide condemnation.
And then –oh my heavens!– faculty members refused or ignored our repeated offers to come to campus to answer questions or have an open debate, all the while pretending to students that we had not made those offers. One teacher repeatedly spent class time vilifying our sanctuary! (Did he not realize that at least one student in class would have the decency to tell us this?)
So, of course students think that we are these crazy people who hate them for no reason. They’ve not been allowed to see our efforts, going back weeks now, to advocate for them.
I’ll get together a list to post soon, but you don’t need me to see that this has damaged the school’s academic credibility. The names of scholars in relevant fields are all over the online petitions and comment sections of blogs or news stories discussing this piece.
We tried to tell GMC that this would happen. Before the first major media news story hit, thereby spreading the story around the world, we wrote to the Provost and President, politely pointing out the likely outcomes if they persisted. Top scholars also wrote them privately. VINE offered –to the Provost, the President, and the Board of Trustees– to help GMC rescue its reputation if they would only show mercy to Bill and Lou. We deliberately did not publicize all that we knew, in order to allow them a face-saving way out of the mess that they had created. They chose not to take it. Hubris, I guess.
Or determination to make a point, no matter what? Tens of thousands of dollars in donations forgone. Academic credibility shot. And for what?
So, you may need to scroll around a bit to find your comment and my response once it is approved. Again, please be patient. I am trying to read and respond thoughtfully and accurately, while also attending to my other work.
I guess I have a question for those in the GMC sustainable farming program. When you graduate, exactly what job opportunities does this program prepare you for? As far as I can see there aren’t too many career opportunities for Ox team drivers, except for perhaps on some Commune somewhere. So someone please enlighten me about what this program is all about and how it relates to real world employment opportunities.
“Mother and friend,” no, I don’t think that comparing me to a spoiled child was a particularly reasoned approach. I had held your comment for reply, but I just now approved it unanswered. For the record, casting aspersions on someone’s motivations for saying something is the logical fallacy called an ad hominem argument. For example, if I say that Farm Manager Mulder doesn’t have a degree in any field related to agriculture, that is either true or false, regardless of my reasons for saying it. It is true, and easily verified by looking at his online CV.
The college should be able to do what they wish with the animals. As long as the oxen can be cleared for consumption, who cares? It is part of the farming process to harvest food. Perhaps it would have been more feasible for you to send an e-mail to the President of the College directly. He seems to be pretty accessible as do the Provost and most of the professors. The school did publicly address the fact that something was going to happen to the oxen-it appeared in the GMC Journal and I think they explained it well. Would it be more appealing to you if they donated the meat to a soup kitchen?
I think the fact that the school has a sustainable farm is wonderful. The fact that the kids are learning something hands on is a great thing. It also serves the greater Poultney Community. So instead of bad-mouthing the college because they’ve made a decision that they did not make lightly, let it go. You just seem to be stirring the pot.
If you will click back to our previous blog post, you’ll see an open letter to GMC students.
Go back one more, and you will see our memo to the Board of Trustees. There’s a link on that page to the letter we sent by both post and email to the college President, getting no reply. Before that we did email the Provost, again getting no reply.
You may also want to visit Google News and type in “Green Mountain College.” You’ll see that the actions of the faculty have led the college to be critiqued on far greater platforms than this little blog. As I just commented to another parent, world-renowned ethologist (and colleague of Jane Goodall) Marc Beckoff has twice blogged his disgust with the college’s reasoning, which he calls “daft” and “ludicrous.” That was on the website of Psychology Today, a major magazine that probably has more viewers in a day than we have in a year.
Next, you might want to use Google or another search engine to find the four or five petitions that, combined, have been signed by more than 70,000 people worldwide, including many more scholars whose opinion matters when it comes to academic credibility.
Maybe you personally don’t care about Bill and Lou. But I suspect that you do care about the reputation of the college your child attends. That reputation was damaged long before I wrote this letter notifying you of that fact. Shoot the messenger if you like, but I’m just bringing you the news.
Furthermore you tried to hide being called out on your immature, destructive, divisive actions by not posting my response to your letter which ultimately bullies an entire community, potentially threatening the livelihoods of people who work at the college, as well as people in the community who depend upon the college for their businesses to thrive. I believe there are plenty of valid arguments on both sides of this dispute. Putting the college and the community at risk will not do anything to bring people around to your position.
You can be mad at me for pointing out that this damages the college’s reputation, or you can be mad at the school for behaving in ways that provoke such a response from top scholars. You can disparage me and my motivations all you like, but this letter wouldn’t matter in the least if it weren’t true.
Humane treatment does not involve the slitting of throats. Offering a humane death is a difficult, compassionate choice made to alleviate suffering and is a last resort. It does not involve a captive bolt gun, a knife, or eating the flesh of a “beloved” animal. That’s just plain creepy, if you give it an iota of thought.
If GMC cared even the tiniest bit about the humane treatment of animals through their life, then they would not so callously and carelessly discard and disregard the lives of Bill and Lou.
I cannot believe people are honestly trying to defend this brutal act of cruelty. If you had working dogs on the farm, would you them same way? Got a limp, bullet to the brain, dog ribs at the cafeteria? There’s no rational-based argument against doing that to a dog versus a cow…except some bizarre human-created criteria for who one can and cannot slaughter and eat.
I wanted to thank you for some of the things that you pointed out in this letter. I am now so much more grateful for the way that my life has turned out, becuase now I realize that every decision I have made that turned out for the better is purely due to luck, as I, at younger ages, was incapable of good judgment. I am so lucky that I graduated from high school with honors while working a part time job and volunteering, all of which I drove myself to (and didn’t case any accidents), I have close relationships with my parents and other family members, I graduated from college, and now hold a career-goal related job, I’m also in optimal health, with no addictions to drugs or alcohol, no STDs, I am also an active and knowledgable member in all of the communities I am apart of, am in a healthy and loving relationship, living completely on my own, and contribute a rather large percentage of my meager income to taxes. All this by the age of 22! Considering I made most of these choice and got to this wonderful place in my life while having an underdeveloped brain that “literally” cannot make educated decisions. I really am lucky. And now that I am 22, I can’t help but think how a nation could possibly let any 18, 19, or 20 year old vote, or go to war, or become a volunteer firefighter or EMT, or serve their country, or they community in any other way!
Bill & Lou are helping the world shine a light on what is going on at GMC, judging by the pictures on the farm page (originals of which are circulating), I cannot imagine what Bill & Lou must have witnessed as well as the other farm animals. Why do these pseudo-farms keep getting access to animals? One post from a GMC student indicated he went to GMC to learn how to slaughter! Outrageous and disturbing.
I don’t understand why everyone is so mad at Vine, can’t you handle the truth? Well, we know the truth now, thousands and thousands of people from around the world and we will hold you accountable!
A substantial body of research shows that –as might be expected from those physiological facts– teens and young adults have a harder time assessing the likely outcomes of their choices than do those whose brains are fully mature. That doesn’t mean that no teen ever makes a good decision or no adult ever makes a bad decision, just that we don’t fully grow into that particular cognitive capacity until we are older.
Why do we see so much literally deadly binge drinking on college campuses? Why do teens and young adults have higher rates of auto accidents than older folks? Why do so many teens and young adults engage in life-threatening behaviors that lead them later in life to shake their heads and wonder how they got out of adolescence alive? I could go on and on.
As I’ve said in response to a previous comment, I understand that it feels insulting to be told this. I remember sitting in a college classroom and fuming as my lifespan psychology teacher insisted that it was true. Wait a few years. At 27, you will look back at yourself at 22 and be proud of all of the good decisions that you made but also know that you have, in fact, gotten even more cognitively capable with age.
And, just to clarify another important point: In academic research, it would not be appropriate to subject research subjects of *any* age to the stress-inducing circumstance of actually deciding whether to kill a perfectly healthy animal like Bill. As I wrote to the President and Provost, that would be a fine thought experiment –making a hypothetical decision as an exercise in ethics– but subjecting students to that stress (and making the animal in question pay the price if the sentence is death) is just not consistent with standard academic ethics.
I would also like to make a point about something you commented in response to Mother and Friend, [your words] “…but this letter wouldn’t matter in the least if it weren’t true.” This is incorrect. A ton of things that are not true (statements, assumptions, etc.) really do matter. Are you going to tell a young girl in high school that a false rumor, or even a grave exaggeration on the truth, that was spread about her isn’t hurtful because it isn’t the truth? Untrue things matter.
Note: I am not soulless, or crazy, and the fact that someone may assume that, because I am speaking out about how someone else is arguing – is also an act of defensiveness. Have I said that I go to GMC? Have I stated that I am for this decision? No. All I have done is share one interpretation of the letter; one that finds it as a generalizing argument (another type of fallacy, but you know that).
The letter was written to and for parents, not to and for their children. Parents of college-age kids know, I think, how rashly the preponderance of teens tend to behave. They do things like posting pictures of themselves with a dead chicken on their Facebook page. Maybe it’s because I am so far from that age myself now, or that I have helped so many of my own students disentangle messes made due to their own reckless decisions, but I am just personally appalled that a college would put the lives of two beings to a vote by college students.
I’m all for student empowerment. I marched for it myself as a student and have consistently supported it as a faculty member. But student empowerment means students making decisions about their own lives and their own educations, not decision about whether other beings should live or die. Lou and Bill’s fate should have been decided by animal welfare professionals in consultation with veterinarians, not by a group of college students, at least some of whom still haven’t grown into their full cognitive capacity for predictive thinking.
“To see the convulsions, agonies and tortures of a poor fellow-creature, whom they cannot restore nor recompense, dying to gratify luxury and tickle callous and rank organs, must require a rocky heart, and a great degree of cruelty and ferocity. I cannot find any great difference between feeding on human flesh and feeding on animal flesh, except custom and practice.” George Cheyne
Bashevis Singer said, “As long as people will shed the blood of innocent creatures there can be no peace, no liberty, no harmony between people. Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together.”
“We can judge the heart of a man by his dealings with animals.” Emanuel Kant
Marie, I started to say more but realized that I really am too sleepy to think coherently. Maybe tomorrow.
@Hearybroken Mom. Nothing I find on VINE I find is untrue, lies, unfactual about GMC. I have written myself to GMC, with no response, when this was coming out. If anything the misinformation, lies and name calling has come from GMC students, not falculty or VINE.
My interest in saving Bill and Lou has to do with my opinion that their slaughter is totally unnecessary. GMC can continue to continue to purchase their hamburger fir thrur carnivorous students and tofu for their vegetarians and vegans. Ten-year meat is not edible in my opinion. I’m vegan, my husband is a hunter. Even he doesn’t eat “aged” wildlife.
This all started out with retiring Lou and Bill to a sanctuary, to live out their natural lives. This has morphed into a non-teaching moment IMHO from GMC, allowing students to direct and drive what the College should be doing not the students. Unfortunately unless someone else steps in and provides money that GMC couldn’t turn down, Bill and Lou will be slaughtered needlessly. That will be a sad day for GMC, its staff and students, as we’ll as two livestock that provided 10 years of service teaching at GMC.
I do not support GMC students to malign VINE, or any sanctuary, for attempting to being to light any situation that could benefit all if us. This us a teaching moment to move us all in a direction away from old school thoughts on morality and ethics. It is not a sanctuary telling anyone what to do, but offering a different teaching model by allowing teaching livestock to live their lives naturally. It would be a win-win opportunity for both GMC and VINE. No negatives. The only negative would Bill and Lou being slaughtered. Money donated to GMC for retiring Bill and Lou would go years farther than any meat, questionably edible, provided in the cafeteria.
I’m assuming that you might not post this, which would quite clearly be a rather craven maneuver on your part, but alright with me as long as you read it yourself.
Your techniques for attempting to either gather people to your side of this cause or simply besmirch the name of a good school are sincerely revolting. It’s very reminiscent of witnessing a political debate, except with less tact and general maturity displayed. Without my exaggerating, most of what you’re promulgating is twisted, cherry-picked misinformation. I’ve seen that you’ve been challenged to provide proof or empirical evidence for many of your outrageous or generalized claims, and your responses indicate to me that you don’t understand what proof and empirical evidence are. It is painfully evident in many of your more manipulative commentary that you have never set foot at Green Mountain College, though you somehow seem to believe that you have an objectively better perspective on this matter than the people who are living it. What you have, in reality, is a very strong opinion, very limited understanding of what this decision process actually was, and less than one leg to stand on. It seems to me, based on the clearly overwhelming support of this decision among the GMC community, that your only bastion in this argument is the notion that the entirety of the GMC community is either evil or brainwashed. This is hilarious. Anyone who elects to believe this, based on the preaching of someone who gets all their information about this deeply complex issue from the internet, is absolutely wasting the blessing of being born with a mind of their own. Don’t attempt to speak for the GMC students. The last thing that any of them would want is for someone to believe that you, of all people, know what’s best for them, better than they do.
On top of being a mediocre albeit tenacious spin doctor, you are disrespectful. You are disrespectful to the students and their parents by coloring them as incapable and disconnected, and you are disrespectful to the college by slandering them as you have. And yes, I mean the literal definition of “slander”. It is my belief that you are either unintelligent, and trying in earnest to rally support for your ideals, or that you are somewhat clever, and working to slander the name of this college because you disagree with something that they have done. Neither possibility impresses me in the slightest.
I am 28 and a very proud alumni of Green Mountain College, and I’ve known Bill and Lou for many years. While I can reasonably concede that there have been extreme and overly negative reactions on both sides of this exchange (among which I count your own), I am prouder today than I ever was, because the community at GMC has made a decision that was uncomfortable to begin with, but that they felt was the right one. And GMC has maintained their position despite it being made more difficult by the unwanted intrusion of people – such as yourself – who (and I can attest to this as a GMC alum) quite simply don’t know what they’re talking about but are hell-bent on affecting this process anyways, or perhaps at least using it to esteem themselves and feel as though they’re doing something righteous in the world.
Let me reach an important point very quickly. There seems to be a fundamental and irreconcilable difference between the GMC community and yourself which is fueling this fire: you don’t believe that any animal should ever be killed if it can ever be prevented, and this belief, for you, is perfectly simple and unassailable. On the other hand, the GMC community believes that slaughtering an animal is sometimes warranted, as the basic ideals of the school are built around both sustainable practice and environmental stewardship, not simply animal rights. Don’t attempt to assail the college’s decision via its core disciplines; many people at the college are experts in these fields. You are not an expert, despite all your online research, and you are never going to convince the GMC community that killing an animal is fundamentally wrong, or even that it is inconsistent with sustainable practice or environmental stewardship. You are acting as an animal rights activist, and you should probably be focusing your efforts on communities and individuals who display real and irrational cruelty to animals by doing things such as testing unsafe products on them or killing them for trophies. At the moment, you are attacking an environmental liberal arts college in rural Vermont, who has lovingly cared for two animals for over a decade and finds themselves finally responsible for the manner of their passing. This is not sugar-coating; these people are not “killers”, and the decision was not easy. But the decision is also made. So go find a more suitable outlet for your extremist agenda. I for one believe that the world may be saved through sustainable practice and environmental stewardship, which is a tad more complex than just trying to save the life of every single animal on the planet, but there’s no need to engage that particular debate, and I’ll tell you why.
I’ve noticed that you are a terrible listener. This saddens me a little bit, as I feel that you probably won’t effectively process any of what I’m saying here. You’re likely reading this and immediately thinking of retorts, backed by some scarcely relevant report or academic quote from the internet, so that you can somehow patronize this entire writing and attempt to render its major tenets seemingly inconsequential or irrelevant for anyone else who looks at it. There is nothing dialectical about your preaching, and your misinformation and misdirection is grotesquely transparent to anyone who knows better. This leads me to believe that you are not actually interested in engaging this topic as a dialogue, which is where forums such as this completely fail. This is not a discussion; it is your soapbox. I understand completely that I’ve likewise discarded the dialectical approach for most of this writing, but I did not have the stomach to appeal to your rationale and then be written off by you like every other person who has attempted such a reasonable approach. What’s different between you and I is that I am not spinning the facts or concocting them as I go along. I have lived with and known these people and these animals, while you have not. What you need to hopefully understand despite my failure to lead by example is that the more you insidiously push your ideals, the more you drive away any chance for the progression of people as a whole, unless you exterminate those of us who don’t agree with you. That is why the only place for people like you is the history books, after they do something acutely enormous, for which they are remembered with either reverence or repulsion. But from what I’ve seen, you have no place in a real discussion about a damn thing. It’s a good thing for you that this is your forum.
In case you’ve forgotten, the people at this college are humans, which are a type of living being. If any part of you can grasp the fact that they are probably not 700+ completely evil, bloodthirsty individuals living together in a small town in Vermont, disguised as an environmental college, and that your little online war is causing or could potentially cause real problems for them, then stop. Focus your attention on people who are abusing animals around the globe and killing them for fun. And if you can’t believe that GMC is not wholly evil and bloodthirsty, then please visit the college for yourself and get at least some vague idea of what you’re attempting to talk about. These are good people who are thinking hard about what they are doing and have made an educated decision without you. If you continue in the way that you have, repulsing good people is the absolute extent of what you will ever achieve.
If by chance, you do post this and answer to each of my major points with honesty and consideration of what I’ve actually said here, then…well…I will be shocked.
I literally do not have time to respond point by point. It’s clear to me, anyway, that reasoned dialogue is useless. You say yourself that you are proud of GMC for sticking to its guns despite opposition. You are proud that GMC professors have refused to rethink, despite being encouraged to do so by their colleagues elsewhere. You are proud that GMC students and administrators have essentially stuck their fingers in their ears and refused to do anything but cycle through a series of contradictory and counter-factual rationalizations for the decision. In my view, that’s nothing to be proud of. When a country or community is the focus of an international human rights outcry, don’t we want them to listen? To rethink? To actually change their minds after learning that what they are doing assaults the conscience of the world? Or are we proud of them for sticking to their guns and doing what they think is OK, no matter what anybody else says?
You may be proud of that attitude, but it is not held in high regard in academia. That was one of the key points of this letter. In academia, we change our minds when we get new information.
Because here is the fact of it: You’re right that we and GMC disagree about animals in the abstract. But this is not about animals in the abstract. This is about the particular case of Bill and Lou. And GMC students have heard from farmers and ranchers and hunters and others who agree with them about animals in general but who point out that retirement of work animals is the humane norm in agriculture. And GMC students –I’ve seen them on film– just keep repeating “this is agriculture, this is what farming is,” sticking to those stereotyped beliefs about farmers and farming regardless of how many times they hear that they are not true.
Where did they get those ideas? Probably from unqualified Farm Manager Mulder, whose antiquated ideas and practices have turned the farm program into something that resembles a cult more than a real sustainable agriculture operation. Driving oxen with a buggy whip –yeah, that’s the kind of skill that will make GMC students creative contributors in the quest for methods to feed 7 billion people sustainably. I am right to tell parents of those students to ask hard questions about their children’s education and whether it is, in fact, preparing them for the challenges of today’s job market.
Look, I’m used to people being mad at me for pointing out uncomfortable truths. I’m used to being called a liar for pointing out uncomfortable truths. And I know that slinging mud at me or my motivations will not change the fact of those uncomfortable truths.
I’ll give you credit for coming late to the discussion and not being in possession of a few key facts. Why have I personally not been on your campus? Because my repeated offers to come to answer student questions or debate in an open forum were refused — by professors who then let students believe we were cowardly ducking their questions. When two of our staff members went to an off-campus event, some students told them they were mad at us for refusing to come.
Speaking of our staff members, we sent our resident cattle care expert to take advantage of an open house on the farm to see Bill and Lou –just to make sure that we weren’t making a mistake in asserting their suitability for sanctuary. She not only saw that Lou is in much better condition than the college has told the media but also saw a calf with so many burrs deeply embedded in and around his penis that he couldn’t urinate in a clear stream. (Yes, we have a picture.) That same calf has since been sold on Craigslist –yes, Craigslist, even though everybody knows that selling animals on Craigslist opens the door to the possibility of abuse unless extreme care is taken to verify that they will actually go where the buyer says they will go (rather than to a private vivisection lab or into the hands of a perverted abuser). The assistant farm manager took the calls and did not take those steps to verify that the calf will be safe after sale. She did, however, insist that the buyer agree as part of the contract to never divulge where the calf came from.
You seem to think we shouldn’t care about that calf or other animals at GMC because… why? Because GMC has some very pretty stated ideals? Because somebody else is perpetrating extreme animal abuse somewhere else? These are the kinds of fallacious arguments that have characterized not only the statements of students but the statements of faculty — even after other scholars have pointed out their logical inconsistencies.
Finally, because I really do not have time to go point by point here, scroll down to my next comment, in which I will reproduce our unanswered letter to the President, just so that you can see an example of the kinds of communications that came before this open letter. You will see that I expressed genuine concerns for the students. This open letter was also motivated not only by concerns for animals but by concerns for students who –within the very closed world of GMC– may not be able to see the ways that they have been done a disservice by those claiming to educate them.
I feel the school needs to review its policies which seem to have somehow missed the mark of late. The foul remarks and name calling in the replies of those purporting to be students and parents of students(are they really? One has to wonder because I for one would not hire anyone who acts like this, I would not be proud of my kid and if I were a kid I would not be proud of my parent!)is certainly cause for concern and should be a major cause for concern to the school.
While free speech is what it is a blatant lack of respect and common courtesy is blackening the image of the GMC even more than just the issue at hand. What was once considered a good school is rapidly being brought down by it’s own students and administration- an administration which has not put a stop to all of this – the name calling, the foul remarks, the non-negotiation of the issue. This tells a lot about it’s policies. I would not recommend this as a place of higher learning any longer and that is a very sad commentary indeed.
Paul J. Fonteyn, President
Green Mountain College
Poultney, VT 05764
Dear President Fonteyn,
In addition to being the co-founder of VINE Sanctuary, I am a scholar, an author, and an educator. I have taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, Metropolitan State University, and Minneapolis Community & Technical College. I am an associate at the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies and an advisory faculty member at the Kerulos Center. I serve on the editorial boards of the Journal for Critical Animal Studies and the Peace Studies Journal. My own publications include one book and multiple scholarly anthology chapters as well as peer-reviewed journal articles.
University of Maryland Eastern Shore is a land grant college with an agricultural program. So, I do have some sense of where Green Mountain College might be coming from in its thinking on the oxen known as Lou and Bill. At the same time, I feel—strongly—that defensive digging-in-on-a-decision has prevented college administrators from adequately grappling with several key questions.
Here they are:
(1) What about the scholarly principle of reconsidering in light of new data? As I understand it, the decision to kill Bill and Lou was made in August and most of the discussions verifying that decision occurred before VINE learned of the controversy and made the offer of sanctuary. Prior to VINE’s offer, the decision was between (a) killing them, (b) paying for their care, or (c) selling them off to an uncertain fate. But now there is a new option, and I do not believe you can sincerely say that option has been fully and fairly considered.
(2) What about the confirmation bias? Once a decision has been made, people tend to cognitively favor information that confirms that decision and to disfavor information that disconfirms it. This is not necessarily conscious. Experiment after experiment has demonstrated that people tend to forget, not notice, or discount information that contradicts a currently held belief or suggests that a previous decision was wrong. What steps have been taken—in considering VINE’s offer of sanctuary—to override those natural cognitive biases?
(3) Should public opinion be ignored? Another piece of new information is that this decision has shocked the conscience of people around the state and around the world. Going by the public statements of the college, it appears that information has been greeted with the same disdain with which international outcries about human rights are sometimes greeted. But don’t we want countries—and communities—to listen seriously, and sincerely reconsider their position, when “outsiders” tell them that something they are doing is cruel or unfair?
(4) Have students been well served by this process? I have several concerns here. First, since there is a well-established gender difference in opinions about animal rights and animal welfare, I worry that the women on campus have been overridden or made to feel silly or sentimental if they opposed the slaughter. Apart from that question, I am very concerned about the well-being of students who feel close to these animals and oppose their slaughter. Whatever they themselves choose to eat, how will they feel knowing that Lou and Bill are on the menu for others? But, I am possibly even more concerned for those students who have voted to kill Lou and Bill. My guess is that many will later regret and feel deep remorse about this decision. I do not feel that college students should be put in the awful position of deciding whether sentient beings should live or die. If this were an experiment on the students, it would be considered unethical due to the stress involved in making such a decision. This should have been a thought experiment, not a decision upon which the real lives of innocent being depended. That can still be the case, if the administration steps in to stay the order of execution.
(5) What about callousness? Lou and Bill were forced to work whether they liked it or not. To make them work, the farm manager and the students he directed yoked them and even—it appears, given the picture of the faculty member with the raised whip over the animals’ backs—beat them. To do this, they had to numb their feelings of sympathy. They had to specifically ignore Lou and Bill’s wishes and interests. How, then, could they possibly suddenly be capable of adequately considering Lou and Bill’s wishes and interests when deciding their fate? It is not an accident, I think, that the farm manager came up with the slaughter-for-hamburger idea. Were it not for his idea, no student would have suggested slaughtering the animals who had become the school’s mascot—especially not with the offer of a free home for the rest of their natural lives on the table.
(6) What about authority? Green Mountain College prides itself on respecting student self-determination. But I wonder if the persuasive power of authority has been fully accounted for in this case. The farm manager is a trusted authority figure to whom many students undoubtedly feel loyal. We saw, with the infamous Milgram shock experiment, that many people readily behave hurtfully if an authority tells them this is the right thing to do. The farm manager, for reasons of his own, has been adamant that these oxen must be killed. Can the college be certain that his strong feelings about this have not influenced the many students who look up to him?
(7) What’s wrong with mercy? Even if the decision to kill Bill and Lou was made without any of the problems I have described, what would be the harm of staying the execution and showing mercy? Convicted killers at least have the opportunity to argue for clemency. But, it seems, Green Mountain College has refused to seriously consider VINE’s offer of sanctuary, insisting that Bill and Lou must be killed because the decision had already been made.
(8) Are Lou and Bill objects? I understand that the college wants this decision—including any subsequent feelings—to be an object lesson for the students. But haven’t Lou and Bill served as objects for long enough? They are sentient beings. Oxen share the same basic brain architecture responsible for emotion in people. To kill them just to make a point, when you could so easily grant them ease and freedom, seems to me—and to so many others who have written to the college—to cross the line into what even many animal farmers and meat eaters would consider “inhumane.”
(9) Is this good for the college? The decision to kill Lou and Bill has assaulted the ethical sensibilities of people worldwide—including prominent scholars like Marc Bekoff, who has written that he “will do all I can to publicize the heartless and unnecessary slaughter of these amazing animals far and wide” if the college persists in carrying out the death sentence. While the campaign to save these oxen was begun by local animal welfare advocates, national organizations have taken note. I see from the most recent issue of the newsletter of the Institute of Animals & Society that the college is seeking to promote its new animal studies program. Is the slaughter of Bill and Lou the way to kick off that effort? Or, would the news—now sure to be spread worldwide—that the college has elected to spare their lives make more of a positive impact?
All of the foregoing represents my personal assessment of the situation as a psychologist and educator. Let me now speak for VINE:
We reiterate our offer of a retirement home for these two college workers. Our ability to care for them is uncontested and can easily be verified by Farm Sanctuary (the oldest and most reputable farmed animal sanctuary in the country) and our veterinarian.
We understand that the college may feel we have misrepresented its position. We are not responsible for the text of the online petition created by another local animal advocacy organization. Our own action alert was informed by a conversation between VINE Cofounder Miriam Jones and Kenneth Mulder and does not misrepresent what he said. It was he who foregrounded the economic issue, secondarily raising the issue of wasting resources on no-longer-productive animals.
We are ready and eager to work with Green Mountain College to bring this to a conclusion that spares the lives of Lou and Bill while also rewarding the college for its humane decision. Looking past that happy outcome, we would be delighted to be part of any on-campus debates or fora on relevant ethical or environmental questions.
We ask you, as President, to step in to offer clemency to Bill and Lou. In the alternative, we ask that you delay their slaughter until after the next meeting of the Board of Trustees and place the question on the agenda for that meeting.
Sincerely,
pattrice jones
Co-founder, VINE Sanctuary
cc. Board of Trustees
Bill Throop, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs
http://www.causes.com/causes/644857-let-s-turn-facebook-orange-for-animal-cruelty-awareness/actions/1696966