Building off the known success of therapy dogs and the general presence of four-legged friends on campus, Stevens has announced that all classrooms will now feature a class pet for students to interact with before, during, and after classes. Similarly to the responsibility many students may have had in elementary school of taking care of the science lab pets at resource, work study positions will be available for those who wish to feed and maintain the animals’ living spaces. This writer would like to note that like in elementary school, it will be possible to be fired for going to recess instead of feeding the fire-bellied toads too many times, but we all should have grown out of that by now.
As some of the animals were being brought in, a few of our reporters had a Harry-Potter-In-The-Woods-With-Hagrid-Too-See-The-Dragons moment and got a sneak peek at some of our new furry friends. Except none of them were furry. From feathers to scales, an assortment of ostriches, alligators, porcupines, and more were backed into loading docks by Physical Plant trucks.
After sneaking in later in the week to the building where they were stored, we got to get an up close look at the animals that will be joining us in class. “I’m looking forward to living in Altorfer 501,” said Alvin the talking alligator, causing our reporter to jump out of his shoes and into galoshes that were next to Alvin’s habitat. This made Alvin chuckle a bit, which we didn’t know alligators could do.
At Off the Press though, we knew the animals wouldn’t be happiest in classrooms, listening to heat transfer coefficients, missing semicolons, and surface integrals, so instead we made a rash decision and began opening cages. First, an ostrich was let loose, but to our surprise, did not fly away into the night after it got outside. Research later revealed that ostriches do not, in fact, fly. We lost the porcupines pretty quickly because they ran and hid in some corners so if you ever end up with a quill in your sock after a class in Burchard, that was probably our fault. Alvin was the last one to go as in the brief time they spent together, our reporters had grown quite attached to him, but we knew Altorfer was not the place for him. After many pets, a handshake, and hugs, Alvin was released into the night and did the classic alligator waddle down to the river where we can only assume he remains today.
As for the administration, after they found out all the animals had been released they denied their existence in all of our interviews with them but did mention they weren’t sure how they would handle the extra work study students whose positions had mysteriously disappeared into the night. If someone knows if they did send out information about the animals, please send it to us because as a matter of policy, we do not read official Stevens emails.
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