Class B dealers for sale can come from a wide variety of sources , including stray animals, animals free to a good home, and pounds or shelters. Some animals are also purchased as by-products of other cruel animal industries. This includes fetal pigs from slaughterhouses as well as skinned mink, foxes, and rabbits.
Most of these animals were raised in terrible conditions , and it seems an added cruelty for them to face dissection after death. Besides the animal cruelty involved in dissection, there are also serious environmental and health concerns associated with this unnecessary practice. The U. Department of the Interior identified removal of frogs from their natural habitats for dissection and vivisection as a part of the reason for lower amphibian population.
Frogs play a critical role in balancing their ecosystem. They are at the bottom of the food chain and serve as an invaluable food source for bats important ecosystem pollinators and smaller predators like foxes.
In addition to having a direct impact on animal populations, dissection hurts the environment in other ways. Formaldehyde has also been identified as a possible human carcinogen which is concerning considering students are often directly handling animals doused in this chemical. More and more students and teachers alike are objecting to dissection and questioning its validity as a learning tool in the classroom.
Luckily for students at the K level, they are legally allowed to refuse animal dissection. There are also laws in 11 states concerning student choice, as well as several other states with informal choice policies. The artificial amphibian could be a better ambassador for science, its proponents say, giving even those leery of the dissection table an introduction to the biological world.
The idea that dissections dissuade students from pursuing a science career is not new. Dorian Solot, now a sex education expert, conducted fieldwork while she was an undergraduate at Brown University, interviewing students at a Rhode Island middle school who were dissecting fetal pigs. The message is that detachment from caring about animals is a key skill for scientists. If you don't have it, science may not be the right field for you.
That idea is also reflected in a Journal of Research in Science Teaching study that included interviews with girls and their attitudes toward dissection. Jan Oakley teaches science education at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada, and published investigations of secondary students' and biology teachers' feelings about dissection in two different journals in and Among her findings was that ambivalent students felt pressure from teachers to dissect.
Despite such evidence, as well as studies showing students learn anatomy better through virtual dissection software and a trend away from animal and human cadaver dissection in veterinary and medical schools, many teachers still view animal dissection as pedagogically superior. This is certainly true for some students. Computer simulations are another possibility.
Biomedical professionals may need dissections as part of their training, but that belongs in advanced courses, not at the introductory level. I wonder how many members of the Animal Liberation Front got their first push in that direction as sensitive children forced into the dissection laboratory.
How many would-be naturalists are turned off the entire matter of science by well-intentioned efforts to teach them the internal organs of a frog?
Neither dissection nor animal research should be abandoned, but both deserve careful, critical evaluation. Animal rights advocates raise a constructive challenge when they urge scientists to avoid unneeded animal research. We should take that opportunity to rethink practices in the laboratory and the classroom, not to defend mindlessly the established order.
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Reprints and Permissions. Sapontzis, S. We should not allow dissection of animals. J Agric Environ Ethics 8, — Download citation. Issue Date : September Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:.
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