Animal rights advocate asks biologists to cut dissections

Editor:
When students at a high school “Participation in Government” class were asked to invite outside speakers to debate controversial issues, I accepted this opportunity to discuss why I believed the school should stop purchasing animal “specimens” for teaching biology and should instead use life-like three-dimensional plastic models with removable parts and/or interactive
computer programs.

I showed the class a People For The Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) video, “Classroom Cut-Ups,” which depicted, among other abominations, workers at a dissection supply house embalming animals – from cats to crabs – while they were still alive.

Frogs are usually dropped into an alcohol solution, which takes about 20 painful minutes to cause death.

According to Physicians Committee For Responsible Medicine, the formaldehyde used to preserve the animals’ bodies can harm people exposed to it. Formaldehyde is a carcinogenic irritant to eyes, skin, throat, lungs and nasal passages.

The National Association of Biology Teachers has urged schools to offer alternatives to dissection.

I shared all this with the students and asked if their biology class dissection experiences helped them to learn biology. Most replied, “No.”

One student wondered if it was unethical to dissect fetal pigs that were taken from the bodies of their butchered mothers. They would not have survived anyway. I replied that dissecting fetal pigs was perhaps a lesser evil than killing live animals for dissection, but why dissect any animal?

Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer told Dateline NBC, “In 9th grade, in biology class, we had the usual dissection of fetal pigs, and I took the remains home and I just started branching out to dogs and cats.”

I suggested to the students that while I trusted their dissection experiences had not demonized them, I nevertheless agreed with Adelphi University biology professor, George Russell, who wrote “dissection not only fails to promote reverence for life, but encourages the tendency to blaspheme it” by desensitizing students to cruelty and to the sanctity of life.

But most schools and colleges in America continue to emphasize dissection. Educational administrators should listen to what one student told PETA, “I passed geography without leaving my home state and passed geology without seeing planets collide. It’s insulting to argue that students can’t understand anatomy unless they stick scissors into a frog’s brain.”

Joel Freedman
Chair, the public education committee of Animal Rights Advocates of Upstate
New York

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Sep 17 2004. Filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry