Conspiracy nuts

Michael Sloan

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What really happened to the squirrels of Yale? When students came back this fall, at least one senior became convinced that the campus’s cutest rodents had gone missing—and suspected foul play. “It appears that the administration paid to have all the squirrels on campus killed over the summer,” the would-be whistleblower wrote to the gossip site Gawker in September. After other news outlets picked up the story, the Yale Daily News printed a pageful of photos of campus squirrel sightings. Even so, Yale spokesman Tom Conroy was forced to issue a statement asserting that “Yale has no squirrel extermination program and has not made any effort to reduce or manage the squirrel population.” (But isn’t that just what you’d expect them to say?)