Recently, after completing a google search on, "Where do the animals for dissections come from?" some interesting points arose. I can not testify to the validity of them, but if they're true, they slightly alter my enthusiasm on conducting dissections at the high school level.
1. Does dissecting further a students education at the high school level? There are many people out there that do not think so. Many people think models are much clearer for the identification and wrote memorization of the organs of specimens. Go to this link
( http://www.animalearn.org/about.php) to access a search engine on the right hand side of the search page. After defining your criteria for a dissection substitution, an abundant amount of substitutions for preserved specimens will be displayed.
2. The following link, PETA's Take on dissection was disturbing. Even though it is a biased website, obviously designed be a PETA member, it makes some good points about the attitudes of students towards dissection. For example, In 1989, Larry Morris Brown of Wright State University polled ninth-grad students in Ohio for their opinions on dissection and discovered the following:
• 33% were bothered by dissection.
• 90% felt that they should be allowed to choose an alternative.
• 50% said that given the choice, they would choose an alternative.
• More than 80% said that teachers should encourage students to share their feelings about dissection and that animal rights should be a part of biology class.
In conducting the dissections in my classes, I actually saw about 20% of my students act the same way.
3. In
addition to controversies about the ethics and utility of live animal
dissection, many schools now also face financial pressures that make the cost
of equipping classrooms and science labs with dissection kits and frog
specimens prohibitive.
That’s
where the popular phrase “There’s an app for that” comes in. The educational
software maker Punflay provides one alternative to live animal dissections.
Punflay has built dissection apps, available on iPad and desktop, which
simulate the dissection process. Currently Punflay has two versions: frog and
rat dissection. Click this Link to access the Link Site Punflay
Either way, whether you dissect or you do not, what needs to be taken into consideration are the ethical attitudes of students and parents alike.
Very good points. One possibility might be to only use plants or lower invertebrates for a start. And then only do them when they show clear educational benefits.
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