The first week of my first semester, word was that the upper years would "initiate" us on some unknown day. We were advised to wear farm clothes to class until it had happened (if you don't know, farm clothes are those that you wear when you're around large animals, like, uh, on farms, that you don't mind getting dirty and gross). This annoyed me. I wasn't very pleased with the idea of being forced through some stupid hazing.
I should probably say right now that as far as I am aware, everyone involved had fun for the most part, and no one got hurt. This goes on every year and is very public, so I imagine if someone had a big enough problem with it, the school would have done something about it.
My theory was that they were going to get us in our first anatomy lab. After all, it's a giant room that can fit everyone and has drains, and we'd have to be at anatomy lab, and there's no easy escape. In retrospect, that obviously would not have happened, because there's sharp things and delicate things and chemical fumes and it's just not a great place to be running around. As it turned out not being in lab, the next day we were sure it was happening but didn't know when.
About half way through our last lecture of the day, someone got up to go to the bathroom. This is perfectly normal and I didn't put any thought to it until she came back a minute later looking very startled and announced to the class: "Don't try to go to the bathroom right now. There's a hundred people out there with masks that tried to stop me." Chatter erupted in the class, and the lecturer pretended he didn't know anything about this initiation business. I don't know if they had lost their advantage of surprise, or they really did plan on coming in half way through the lecture, but a few minutes later, a bunch of masked upper years in overalls stormed in.
They commanded that we take off our shoes, and quickly surrounded the aisles to prevent escape. They tag tied everyone by the wrists so you ended up in a long chain with the people you had been sitting next to. They may have linked the rows together, but if they did it didn't last long because people were passing around means to cut themselves free before too long. The upper years weren't super creative; they used markers and lipstick to draw on peoples faces, and they had cat food they were forcing a few people to eat. Once everyone was tied together, we were ushered out of the building (without our shoes remember), and outside we were met with a gauntlet of upper years, all armed with eggs and flour and water balloons and milk and oatmeal and all manner of unidentifiable stuff.
After sprinting through that, which involved a lot of ducking, we headed toward the main concourse. It turns out I had sat between two groups of friends, so in front of me there was a pair running side by side, and behind me there was a trio helping each other out, and in the middle was me, getting twisted around because I was tied between them and they didn't feel like making one big line.
When we got to the concourse, it turns out that word had gotten around, and water balloons had been given to anyone that wanted one. So there was a new gauntlet to face, this time from a bunch of random students, who probably wandered over and were like, "What's this about?" and realised how funny it would be to throw water balloons at a bunch of first year vets. Once we made it through that, they had us run across campus to the field outside the sports centre. On the way there, some of our braver classmates got them back pretty well. If anyone managed to catch an unbroken water balloon, it was thrown back (plenty of other things were thrown back too), and a few upper years got tackled and/or chased. By the time we got to the sports field, the upper years were as messy as we were.
There was a hedge lining the field, and we were being funneled into a little opening in it. You could hear screams from the other side, so the slowed traffic added to the suspense. Finally, it was my turn to slip through the hole, and on the other side there is a big hill with a plastic slide set up. I'm not sure what the slide was lubricated with but I heard people saying it was soap. At the bottom of the slide there was a huge pile of horse poop. Behind the huge pile of horse poop was a huge pile of vet students, who, just to make sure you had at least some contact with poop, were throwing it at people coming down the slide. I took one to the forehead.
If you've never seen horse poop before, don't worry, it's pretty innocuous. There are much worse things they could have chosen to throw at us.
After going down the slide, people were dispersing, so it looked like it was over, though one of the upper years had a megaphone and was shouting something incomprehensible. Turns out they had taken our shoes, locked them away, and put the key in the pond outside the vet tower. This did at least result in several upper years being tackled into the pond. It's not as bad as it could have been, because the key was in a water balloon, and it was just a matter of wading out and checking every balloon until we found it. It was in the last balloon.
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