An Animal's Anatomy and You
By Lydia Breckon
For as long as biology class has existed, the main worry of any high school student is that they’ll have to dissect a frog. While primarily a hands-on learning experience, animal dissection has developed a stigma amongst teenagers as being “gross” and sometimes even a fate worse than death. So, should we be killing and mutilating animals in order to learn from them? And is dissection in schools really resulting in more good outcomes than bad?
On one side of the issue, teaching and or practising dissection can have negative psychological effects and can be damaging to the survival of a species. It is estimated that, on average, the US school system dissects around six million frogs every year. Although frogs are not necessarily endangered animals, breeding them costs time and money and catching frogs can be damaging to an ecosystem where other animals rely on frogs as a food source. On a more personal level, according to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine an experiment on seventh graders in 1997 showed that teaching dissection in classes encouraged hostility to animals and stopped students from wanting to peruse Science as a career.
However, there is an opposite side to dissection and it is one I find myself more drawn to. Although I do disagree with killing millions of innocent animals for a group of students who seem more interested in saying how disgusting something is than actually learning from it, dissection is one of the best ways to learn and can be done in a relatively moral way. Spoiler alert for those wanting to study biology at IB level: you will dissect at least one animal part over the two years of the programme. In my case it was a sheep’s heart. In all honesty, I was probably a bit more squeamish than I should have been but through this experience I was able to apply classroom knowledge in a more realistic, and thus educational, way. In addition, since sheep hearts are close in anatomy to those of humans, I was able to develop a greater understanding of my own body and its functions. What’s more, the hearts used in the experiment were from a butcher, meaning the sheep were going to be killed anyway and they weren’t being “put to waste”. You might be against this idea if you’re a vegetarian but to meat-eater like me it is a quite substantial compromise. On a bigger scale, science shows like Channel 4’s Inside Nature’s Giants (that deeply investigates the larger creatures that roam our planet), also point out that the animals used have been killed for other reasons besides for the purpose of the show or have died from natural causes.
Using animal dissection as a teaching method in schools and as a way of learning in the science world should not be condemned. That being said, I do agree there should be some restrictions put on animal dissection. It should not have to begin with students being required to kill the animals and should perhaps be restricted to older students who understand the value of this experiment and, hopefully, have the sense of morality (and common sense) to not try to ‘deeply investigate’ every animal they come across.