Amherst College changes name of mascot to an extinct herbivore—poetic

Amherst College changed their mascot from the Lord Jeffs (short for Lord Jeffrey Amherst) to the Mammoths. When asked why they chose the name of an extinct animal, they explained that mammoths were stupendous, monumental, highly social, and herbivores. (Have the fat students—especially the fat cheerleaders—at Amherst complained about mammoths being call stupendous rather than “big boned” or “food-consumption-discipline challenged?”)

Herbivores? Is that a virtue? An herbivore is a vegetarian. Termites are herbivores. So are boll weevils. This is the state of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Is cream a vegetable?

Use an incisor, go to prison

In the state that elects socialist Bernie Sanders to the Senate, eating meat is apparently an atrocity. Are Amherst students now required to be vegetarians? Are the students, faculty, administrators, and alumni who voted for this change all herbivores?

The old mascot is a war criminal

Why change from Lord Jeffs? He once reportedly suggested deliberately infecting the local Indians with smallpox. In view of the fact that microscopic pathogens were not known until the late 1800s, how was he so prescient? And if he was so prescient, how come he did not know that germ warfare would be banned by the Geneva Protocol of 1925?

Wikipedia says,

“Rudimentary forms of biological warfare have been practiced since antiquity. During the 6th century BC, the Assyrians poisoned enemy wells with a fungus that would render the enemy delirious. In 1346, the bodies of Mongol warriors of the Golden Horde who had died of plague were thrown over the walls of the besieged Crimean city of Kaffa. Specialists disagree over whether this operation may have been responsible for the spread of the Black Death into Europe.

“The British Army used smallpox against Native Americans during the Siege of Fort Pitt in 1763. An outbreak that left as many as one hundred Native Americans dead in Ohio Country was reported in 1764. The spread of the disease weakened the native's resistance to the British troops led by Henry Bouquet. It is not clear, however, whether the smallpox was a result of the Fort Pitt incident or the virus was already present among the Delaware people. It has been claimed that the British Marines used smallpox in New South Wales in 1789.”

And speaking on behalf of the part of me that is Cherokee Indian, does anyone really believe that we Indians would not have used germ warfare against the whites if we had known it was possible? We were not just noble primitives who would restrict ourselves of splitting your skull open with our tomahawk and slicing your scalp off with a flint knife so we could display it as a souvenir of the guy whose wife and children we also kidnapped.

And what about the fact that the Indians in question must have been engaging in violent crimes against the whites to inspire consideration of any method of capital punishment of the Indians? Those arrows did not have suction cups and the tomahawks were not rubber.

Amherst tried to recruit my son to play football there. I’m glad he did not even apply there and played in the Ivy League instead. Although it would fun to have a football team composed entirely of vegetarians as opponents.

One final note:
Vermont Deer Seasons Dates
Archery October 7- November 3, 2017 December 2-10, 2017
Youth Deer Weekend November 4-5, 2017
November Rifle November 11-26, 2017
Muzzleloader December 2-10, 2017
Deer Fetus Abortion January 1-December 31, 2017

So get your Vermont Bambi Chops (venison) before they are outlawed. Ditto English muffins because the British actually used germ warfare against the Indians.