When I first went to college at Washington State, they had an actual cougar as the school mascot. But when he died, they decided (correctly, in my opinion) that keeping a cougar in that small cage was cruel, so they didn’t changed the mascot to a person in a cougar suit.
It seems to me that getting rid of live mascots is an ongoing trend for colleges. At least, Navy didn’t seem to have their goat at the recent game with Notre Dame. Instead they had a guy in a goat outfit.
USC still has Traveller, the Trojan Horse; Colorado still has Ralphie the buffalo and Georgia has their bulldog. Does Army still have mules and Air Force have the falcon?
What other schools still have live animal mascots?
I am surprised at the OP Navy comment – maybe it was an away game? because they most certainly do have a live Ram that is trotted out on the feild at sporting events.
Currently his name is Bill the 30th. He is taken care of by middies who are trained and honored to do it
(top of the 3rd pg) http://www.navysports.com/sports/wvball/mediaguide/part-2.pdf
Well, apparently Navy has both live goats and the guy in the suit. I didn’t see the entire game (which was a home game for Navy), so perhaps I missed the goats.
Yale has kept the tradition of Handsome Dan by having someone involved with the university take care of a bulldog with that name that is endorsed by the university or some such. However, I don’t know if the current Handsome Dan is descended from the original or not.
I did, however, get to pet the current Handsome Dan at the Yale-Harvard game last year. It was either that or the tercentennial celebration they had earlier in the year, I forget.
(The story of Handsome Dan, and the origin of the Bulldogs as Yale’s mascot is as follows: some time before the turn of the century, a Yalie got a bulldog from a blacksmith who no longer wanted to keep him for whatever reason. The dog had been stained black with soot, but when the guy took him back and gave him a bath, the guy found that the dog had a nice brown and white coat. The guy marveled, “Well you’re a regular handsome dan, aren’t you?” and began to take the dog with him to football games and such. The dog became a fixture, and thus Yale’s mascot was established.)
Funny, I was at the Baylor game last weekend (a far better outcome than TT yesterday :() and I saw no live Bevo. Not sure what the explanation is - he’s still on the Website.
As for the Aggies…well, now I don’t much like to dwell on the subject, because A & M is not so much a university as it is a cult. (How else are they going to get anybody to spend for years in…College Station? BTW, it really is eerie to watch to watch 100,000 fans swaying in unison…)
Anyway, the collie referenced is called Reveille. The current is Reveille VII; Reveille VI retired last year but is still living. What happens to dead Reveilles is truly bizarre.
From www.aggiesports.com, a commercial website of the Bryan/College Station Eagle:
Observing that they’re indigenous, and wanting to make a pet out of one are two separate issues. It would probably get asaulted by fans from the other schools, anyway. With real salt.
There was at least one professional sports team that had a live animal as a mascot: the short-lived World Football League’s Memphis Southmen. The mascot was a live bear. He once caused a power outage by chewing through the wires.
I was hoping someone could explain what on earth is the whole POINT of having an animal mascot at at football game. What purpose does it serve? What the heck is a mascot, anyway?
Fordham University in the Bronx (My mom and three uncles went there) has a ram as its mascot, and all its teams are named the Rams. When I was a kid I was taken to see Ramses the VII, and there’s also a tape of him bleating anxiously on the last trip of the Third Avenue El in the Bronx in 1973.
I don’t know what ram they’re up to now, but there was still one as of 1999. There’s plenty of room for him up on the pastoral Rose Hill campus, and it’s not like there’s not plenty of animals up here already–the Bronx Zoo is half a mile away.