More and more students are fighting for the right not to dissect animals.
They argue that they can learn the same thing from computer simulations. The Humane Society is supporting them in their efforts to have new laws passed than don’t force anyone to dissect if they have moral qualms against it.
Several teachers associations argue that “No alternative can substitute for the actual experience of dissection.”
Is this an issue of pandering to students’ wishes, even to the extent of them not learning as much? Or is it at long last acknowledging that the schools need to respect students’ moral belief system?
Dissection IS a better teaching method than computer simulations - even the best model or computer simulation lacks the subtle details of a real body, and if your really want to learn anatomy well, you’re going to have to engage in dissection.
That being said - how many people REALLY need to learn advanced anatomy? Most students in primary and secondary education only need to learn the basics of anatomy; they don’t need to learn to reliably recognize small structures in living bodies. They can learn basic anatomy from models, books, or computer simulations well enough. It’s the biology majors at the university level, biosciences graduate students, vet students, dental students, and medical students who whose learning requirements are such that computer simulations can’t substitute for actual dissection.
Let the high school students and the college kids taking “Biology for Non-Majors” opt out if they wish - but not the vet students or the med students or the biology majors. Honestly, if you’re that opposed to dissection, those aren’t fields you should be entering anyway, as you’ll almost certainly have to do more traumatic things than cut up a dead cat in all of them!
I do believe that it is hard to learn the details from a computer simulation. The whole reason for doing dissections is to get something more than what you can get out of a book. Dissections are 3-D, and frankly we’re not up to the stage where you can have 3-D computer displays.
My freshman year of high school (frogs), one student who was particularly vocal about animal rights elected not to dissect one, and relied on some site on the internet. My senior year of high school (earthworm, crayfish, frog, plus a teacher demo of a shark), students were not required to actually dissect an animal, but they were held liable for the material (for the exams, there would be teacher-dissected animals with numbered pushpins, and you were to name the structure “pinpointed” by each).
In college, there really wasn’t an option. The dissections (shark and a cat, plus a TA-dissected salamander) were the main point of the course. Granted, the class was “Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy.”
I’ve tried to follow my 9th grade biology teacher’s rule: try to learn enough from the dissection to make it worth the frog’s (or any other animal’s) life.
I’m one of those people who refuses to do animal dissections. I’m in year 11 at the moment, and this year for biology we were required to dissect a rat. My friend and I didn’t participate in the dissection, but looked at a book with pictures of an actual rat in various stages of the dissection process… nobody in the class batted an eyelid, and the teacher didn’t mind at all.
In year 8 science, we were also required to dissect a rat. At that age, nobody knew what we were dissecting the rat for, so people ended up just crucifying the bodies with drawing pins and picking their eyes out etc. The disgusting thing is that, this year, many people did exactly the same thing.
There were no distinct instructions, apart from in the book I read, and most of the rats were just cut up randomly. Personally, I think I learnt a lot more than I would have if I had dissected the rat, as everything was pointed out in the book, and none of my examinations at the end of this year, or at the end of school, require cutting anything up. If anyhting, they’ll involve labelling a diagram, but even that is highly unlikely since dissecting an animal wasn’t directly related to the curriculum.
For those reasons, I don’t believe dissecting anything in highschool or primary school is at all necessary. Personally, I find it disgusting.
artemis, in some cases opting out of the basic biology course is not possible. At my university, people who do not want to be veterinarians or doctors have to take the biology course whose lab includes dissection. Majors like nutrition or environmental sciences require it, even though the students there do not approve of it. In the case of environmental sciences, they disagree with it.
I think those students should be opted to skip the dissection and learn thru the models…if only they weren’t penalized when the practicals came around, and those practicals include a lot of the dissection stuff done in class.
I generally agree with you, though. People in college who want to be doctors or veterinarians should be able to do the dissections. After all, they will see uglier nastier stuff in professional school.
The students in those majors should work with their departments to see if the degree requirements could be changed to allow the substitution of a less rigorous biology course in place of the one they now have to take (which is probably designed with the needs of biology majors in mind).
I assume that the practical involves identifying tagged structures on already-dissected bodies? If the students can’t handle that, that just shows that they HAVEN’T learned as much anatomy as they thought they did from the models and computer simulations - they can’t identify real structures in a real body (which don’t come neatly color-coded, like they are on the models and in the illustrations).
So the question arises - which students REALLY need to learn enough to identify actual structures in a real body (which is one of the things dissection teaches), and which ones merely need to learn about the body’s overall design and organization in a general way, without needing to actually recognize the actual structures “in the flesh” (bad pun intended!)? The former need to do actual dissections; the latter can get by with illustrations, models, and computer simulations.
And they can’t become truly proficent in anatomy without doing dissections - and those people need to be.
A lot of the animal work done prior to professional schools (and even there) is totally unnecessary in my opinion.
The same amount of knowledge can be gleaned in most instances from studying a well-dissected specimen prepared, for example, by the teacher - or by models. About the only people who really benefit from a lot of these dissection procedures are the companies who market the animals.
Even in med school, unnecessary and questionably humane use of animals occurs. In my physiology class a number of dogs were anesthetized and used as models for infusion of pharmacologically active substances - and later euthanized. None of the illustrated principles required live animals for their demonstration. While I don’t think the dogs were caused pain and were destined for euthanasia anyway, I think even minimal trauma to them (and to the student body) was unjustified.
I agree with that, but I don’t know how successful they will be in changing their curriculum. It just seems silly to me that for a major in environmental science (which requires no further biology per se than the first 2 semesters), will insist in the pre-health biology option instead of the other biology courses which are for non-biology majors.
How are you supposed to remove the head from the fetal pig, put it on the end of a pencil, and march around the room pretending you’re a live version of “Lord of the Flies” if you’re using a computer simulation?
How can you remove the tongue from the dissected frog and use it to creep out girls by running it on their arm if you’re using a computer simulation?
Why, these kids are missing out on some of the best times of their lives!
OK, maybe not.
Anyway, I’d agree that most students don’t need live animals for learning anatomy, although I feel it’s a better approach to learning (and for realizing that the organs aren’t actually color-coded).
That’s still a dissection, though - and many of the protesting students would object to even ONE animal dissected by the teacher being used in their class (although this is certainly a way to reduce the total number of animals used for the class while still giving the students the benefits of seeing actual tissues and not just models or diagrams, and in my opinion it should be done more often).
I’ll agree that the use of live animals in physiology class is generally unnecessary (although I’ll NEVER forget seeing the effects of a potassium overdose first-hand in my sheep lab). Where I do think it’s needed, though, is in the teaching of anatomy to people who need to learn it in detail, because they’re later going to be working on living organisms. Computer simulations and models aren’t an adequate substitute for the real thing in those cases.