Billie and Louise — Our Friends, Too

Rutland Herald (Vt.) Editorial, Oct. 27, 2012:

Billie and Louise have won friends around the world. Letters have arrived at the Herald, via email, from Portugal, Ireland, England and around the United States, mostly pleading for the lives of the two coeds. Green Mountain College has reportedly been flooded with angry messages.

It is safe to say that the college’s decision to invade Castleton State College and target these two students for rape, torture and ultimately slaughter has excited alarm around the globe precisely because it was a deliberate decision. Women have been subject to rape, torture and slaughter in every country. Teenagers are chained in confining little houses for the violent pleasure of soldiers before they are dispatched. Old women are crowded into cages. Children are maintained in squalid, crowded camps covered in their own waste, stuffed with grain then trucked to their demise.

But it is the fate of two coeds whose end will be the result of a thoughtful, deliberative process that has produced an outcry. Probably it is because it puts the fact of human slaughter squarely before us as a human choice. Yet that is precisely why Green Mountain College carried out its exercise in thoughtful decision-making. It is part of an educational program about sustainable societies.

The cruelty involved in raising children for slaughter is a fact of life — if you want to call it cruelty. The end to which Billie and Louise are headed is ordinary and common. Their lives are what have been consequential. They have allowed a college community to understand that social relationships are about cycles of life and death. That is a useful sort of education.

Vermont college announces new animal sustainability program

Green Mountain College, a 4-year "environmental sustainability" college in Poultney, Vermont, has decided to do something about the problem of unwanted pets.

With the nation's animal shelters overburdened with the numbers of abandoned and rescued cats and dogs, most of which will never find homes, the sustainability professors at Green Mountain College have long been troubled by the "terrible waste of resources," as Bayley Hazen described it.

Hazen is assistant director of sustainable animal management at the college and was visibly excited to announce the new program.

"In GMC's continuing development of the nation's most progressive sustainable campus, many alumni and current faculty, staff, and students came together and realized that our unique resources and philosophy could be leveraged to make a huge contribution to the sustainability issues surrounding animal shelters."

In short, she said that GMC would adopt dogs and cats from "no-kill" shelters and then kill them as part of their animal sustainability curriculum.

"The numbers are still being worked out: we are carefully calculating, using the best science available, what level of funding should be budgeted, and we need to find a way for the college to benefit directly, but the commitment is already there, because this is something we can do to give back to the community in a way that has no price," Hazen said.

Animal rights organizations, including shelters in the region, as expected, expressed outrage.

"I don't mind," Hazen said, "because secretly they're glad we're doing this."

Hazen added that she is "mostly vegetarian" and loves animals, and that's why she loves Green Mountain College, because "they make the hard decisions that love requires."