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Last year, in a video that made the rounds on social media, students in a San Antonio, Texas, high school anatomy class were shown jumping rope with the intestines of a dissected cat while their teacher and a classmate held the ends of the animal’s guts.
The lesson conveyed to those students that day wasn’t on any syllabus. Rather than learning to respect cats as inquisitive, sentient individuals who, like humans, value their lives, they were taught that animals are laboratory tools to be mocked, mutilated, and discarded—and that respect for life doesn’t matter.
Students in Tampa, Florida, were taught the same thing when they watched their teacher juggle three dead frogs, dropping two, before finally disemboweling them.
And that’s what students in classrooms across the country will learn this year every time another cat, dog, mouse, rat, rabbit, frog, fish, worm, or fetal pig is cut open and tossed aside.
Inhumane and unenlightened, the lessons that were communicated in these Texas and Florida classrooms are part of a systemic problem. Though growing numbers of students at every level are becoming uncomfortable with dissecting animals, their concerns are still being ignored in many school systems.
In his book The Use of Animals in Higher Education: Problems, Alternatives, & Recommendations, noted ethologist Jonathan Balcombe addresses the serious consequences that participating in dissection can have on students’ values and attitudes toward living beings.
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“[E]xercises harmful to animals may tend to desensitize certain individuals, making them more callous toward animals and, by extension, other humans,” he writes.
Seventy-five percent of U.S. high school students participate in dissection, Balcombe adds before citing an even more disturbing fact: There are indications that increasing numbers of elementary school children are being required to dissect animals, too.
His conclusion? “When one considers the associated costs” of teaching dissection to students, among them “messages that tend to undermine rather than reinforce respect for life and concern for others … the balance clearly falls on the side of abandoning dissection.”
Other “associated costs” of these cruel experiments also exact a heavy toll. When the animals are cut open, children are exposed to formaldehyde—a nasal and dermal carcinogen that’s sometimes used to preserve “specimens” for dissection. And studies suggest that in addition to fostering callousness toward animals, dissection can dissuade students from pursuing a career in science.
But the most egregious cost is the loss of life.
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Every year, some 10 million animals are cut apart in elementary, secondary, and college science classes. Some are from breeding facilities that cater to the institutions teaching dissection, others are caught in their natural habitat—which can wreak havoc on fragile ecosystems—and still others are stolen or abandoned animal companions. A PETA eyewitness was told by his supervisor at one of the country’s largest suppliers of animals for dissection that some of the cats being killed and processed there had “escaped” from their homes.
PETA has documented incidences of horrific cruelty at facilities supplying animals for dissection. Employees were seen spitting on struggling cats and rats who had been injected with formaldehyde, and a rabbit who survived being gassed was thrown into a wheelbarrow full of water and other rabbits who had died. The rabbit attempted to climb out, but an employee repeatedly held his head underwater until, finally bored with the “game,” he drowned the animal as his coworkers watched and laughed.
Slaughterhouses and pet stores—and even some animal shelters—also sell animals to biological supply companies, which in turn sell them to schools.
But students don’t have to cut up animals to learn basic anatomy and physiology. Nearly every
comparative study has concluded that non-animal teaching methods are equivalent or, in many cases, superior to dissection.
And increasingly, school science labs are taking note. Rather than using animal cadavers, they’re beginning to emphasize sophisticated alternatives, such as the interactive CD-ROMs “CatWorks Virtual Dissection” and “Digital Frog,” as well as computer simulations, lifelike models, films, and charts.
It’s time for every school system to learn the most important lesson of all: that animals deserve respect and that treating them like classroom equipment is completely unacceptable.
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I guess I was expecting some empirical evidence that alternatives to dissection are more effective than dissection itself. Instead you presented the musings of an ethologist and PETA, an organization that lies through its teeth about animal research and has its own history of euthanizing household pets:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/05/pets-shelter-euthanization-rate_n_6612490.html
In other words, you have not presented any facts to support your claim.
Great article! Dissection is a lesson in cruelty and nothing more.
I completely agree. When I was in school, a lot of my friends were completely put off from pursuing a career in science because we were forced to cut open dead animals. It’s 2017 – let’s use technology to our advantage to really learn and advance without killing animals.
It’s 2017! How, why is any school, anywhere, still encouraging students to cut up dead animals?!