Ralphie Retirement: The Truth

With the retirement of Ralphie VI at the beginning of this semester, a new era has begun here at CU — one of the few universities to have a live mascot program where animal abuse is not just permissible but traditional on a semi-biweekly basis. 

The running of the buffalo is quite a spectacle, and CU students, administration, and marketing interns take great pride in the tradition. But, toward the end of Ralphie VI’s career, she wasn’t living up to the expectations of football fans who were not satiated by what some of them described as a “lack of effort” on behalf of the animal. 

CU Athletics sent in the PR team to make sure that a different message was clear, that Ralphie’s wishes were their priority in terminating her employment, not the fans’ appetite for ritual. In a piece written by Steve Hurlbert—which is a real name of a real person, we would never make these things up—Ralphie VI is going to “focus on relaxing strolls on the pasture,” and that she was experiencing an “indifference to running,” whatever that may mean.

Retired Ralphies, according to CU, are sent to a ranch where they can socialize with one another and are cared for to the highest standard. There wasn’t much reason to suspect otherwise apart from the general secrecy surrounding the program.

That was until a friend of the editor contacted us regarding a curious invitation. They had received a letter sealed in red wax in their work mailbox, inside was an address and a time. We instructed the contact to investigate, and what they found was astonishing. 

They arrived at a Chautauqua mansion with flaming braziers placed along the walk up to the front doors and joined a group of people in large overcoats and masks queuing outside. Some of them were even wearing buffalo headdresses seemingly fashioned from real buffalo heads. The vibe was “somewhere between Eyes Wide Shut and a CU football tailgate,” the contact told us. And the peculiarities did not end there:

A large horse trailer was pulled up in front of the mansion and some bikini- or speedo-clad Ralphie Handlers, still sporting the iconic cowboy hats, opened the back and led out a dazed buffalo that they took around the back of the house. The crowd grew excited, murmuring to one another as they approached the doors. The doormen checked invitations before letting people into the house.

Looking out of place and smelling an incoming orgy, our contact quit the line and fled, but they gave us the address so we could further investigate. Posing as Latter Day Saints, we visited the mansion a few days afterward and were invited into the living room to share another testament of Jesus Christ with the elderly couple that supposedly lived there. The couple wouldn’t introduce themselves by name but went on and on about the various study rooms across CU campus that had been named after them. Much to the gratitude of our reporters, who had prepared for this encounter only by watching the Broadway version of the “Book of Mormon,” the elderly donors seemed more eager to apologize for the “vile slander” of the church by “unruly fans” at the BYU game a few weeks prior than questioning them about points of theology. In a rectifying gesture, they offered our reporters refreshment, bison bone broth they lauded as the most “wonderful health beverage no one is drinking,” and shavings from a massive leg of meat held in some kind of oversized jamonera on their coffee table. The offer was declined because our reporters couldn’t remember whether Mormons ate bison or not.

The living room showed other signs of the animals we knew were being brought here for one reason or another, with a taxidermied bison head above the fireplace and a great rug on the floor. One of the field reporters asked to be excused to use the restroom and did a quick exploration of the house. In the basement, they found an unlocked cellar with three freezers, each labeled rather conspicuously “R74,” “R75,” and “R76.” A stack of half-processed hides, a long, leather whip with a bison tail tied to its pommel, and a gutted bison head, potentially for use as a headdress for future parties, were also kept down there, generating a considerable reek.

The sum of this investigation, of course, implies that not only have there been many more Ralphies than officially reported, but that CU higher-ups may be running a “bison industrial complex” right under our noses… not to mention the apparent buffalo-themed cult . How could this even be possible with so many eyes on the Ralphies at each football game and spontaneous USDA checks of the secret ranch where they are kept? One could say “all bison look the same,” that no one is really paying attention, or that Ralphie Handlers are incompetent or “in on it.” A previous contributor to The Jump has an unfalsifiable theory: cloning — a technique of artifice CU has been repeatedly accused of using in the past to cover up its shadier side. We don’t endorse this theory, but thought we’d mention it for continuity’s sake.

The Jump CU reached out to the USDA for comment on these discoveries. The next day some armed USDA officers showed up at our editor in chief’s residence to send them down to the countryside until they’d learned to stop asking so many questions.