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Action for Animals they exist, are too weak to halt such practices, and abuses will likely continue for as long as schools keep supply companies profitable by purchasing their products. In addition to the humane problems, dissection may also corrupt young people’s attitudes toward animals and nature. Insisting that children cut up dead animals and then put their bodies in a dustbin or a hazardous waste repository is thought by many to undermine the development of attitudes of caring for others and stewardship toward nature. The behavior of many students toward the animals they dissect has been observed to follow a threephase pattern. At first, the student is hesitant to cut into a once-living creature, but as the dissection proceeds, most students begin to show confidence in performing dissection. In the final phase, some students—usually boys—often begin to act callously toward the animal, during which time acts of mutilation are commonplace. This pattern suggests a dulling of the child’s initial concern for the animal, a form of desensitization. Most surveys find that half or more of a typical student population do not want animals to be hurt or killed for their education. However, vastly fewer students—perhaps one in twenty—will resist a teacher who expects his or her students to dissect animals. Conscientious objectors risk possible confrontation with a teacher or the school, deductions in marks, and/or ridicule from less sensitive students. Nevertheless, as public awareness of animals as thinking, feeling creatures grows, more and more students are objecting to dissection. Dissection and live animal experimentation in schools have begun to decline, and the advancement of alternative learning methods is probably most responsible for this trend. Many thousands of alternatives are now available, ranging from simple plastic models to highly sophisticated computer simulations. Computer programs in particular have many advantages. They allow the student to dictate the pace and direction of the lesson; to view microscopic structures and animations unobservable in a dissection; to interact with the program through quizzes, hints, and feedback; and to repeat the exercise as many times as the student wishes. More Alternatives to dissection Dissection is the cutting open and studying of dead animals (see Animals in Research). The dissection of human and nonhuman animals has a long history dating back at least two thousand years. As a method for teaching biology in schools, however, it became common only from the twentieth century onward. Some ten million vertebrate animals—and many more invertebrates—are dissected yearly in classrooms worldwide. Frogs, rats, fetal pigs, cats, snakes, turtles, birds, bony fishes, and sharks are among the commonly used vertebrates; earthworms , crayfish, clams, sea stars, and grasshoppers are commonly used invertebrates. There are two main arguments—one moral and the other practical—against animal dissection or any exercise that inflicts intentional harm on animals in schools. The moral argument is that dissection causes unnecessary animal suffering and death and reinforces the human-centered view that animals are of no moral consequence . The practical argument is that dissection is inferior to alternative learning methods, such as computer simulations, which cause little or no harm to animals. The dissection supply trade undoubtedly causes much animal suffering. Investigations in North America have documented routinely inhumane conditions of capture, transport, housing, and killing. A 1990 undercover investigation of the largest supplier of animals to classrooms in the United States documented many abuses, including video footage of traumatized domesticated cats crowded into wire cages and roughly prodded into gas chambers to be killed. In 1994, another investigation described the rounding up of domesticated cats (including people’s companion animals) from Mexican streets, after which their captors killed them by either drowning them or cutting their throats and then shipped them to a distributor in the United States. Frogs, practically all of whom are taken from free-living populations, are collected in sacks of one hundred or more live frogs. Survivors are killed by immersion in an alcohol solution, a process that takes ten to twenty minutes. Animal protection laws, where balcombe / alternatives to dissection | 271 272 | ryder / animal advocacy than thirty published studies have shown that students learn as well using alternatives as they do using live or dead animals, if not better. These studies span a broad range of disciplines, including general biology, physiology , pharmacology, psychology, nursing, veterinary medicine , and medicine. The use of animals in medical training has been outlawed in the United Kingdom since 1876, and 152 of the 159 American medical schools...

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