Siding with the Amphibian - 19 Jun 2007As a boy at summer camp in southern Ontario I used to frequent the railroad tracks, one side of which had a water-filled ditch where frogs, toads, dragonflies and an occasional snake lurked. I remember one day encountering a scruffy-looking man walking along the tracks with a net in one hand and a gunny-sack in the other. He was collecting frogs. He had a leopard frog in one hand and he asked me to hold it while he went after another frog in the ditch. I was 11, shy, and unwilling to defy authority. But as I stood there looking at this frog and contemplating her grim outlook in this man’s clutches, empathy for the frog overcame me and I quickly released her in the grass.
The man was angry and I took a tongue-lashing, but I’m glad I saved that frog.
Last week my 13-year old daughter spared another leopard frog through a noble act of conscience. She asked to use alternatives instead of dissecting a dead leopard frog in her 7th grade science class. She used several resources, including the Digital Frog 2 CD-ROM, and Uncover a Frog, a 3-D book featuring labeled layers of a frog’s body systems that can revealed with each turn of the page. She scored 100% on the dissection module.
There are many good reasons to forego the scalpel and formaldehyde for animal-friendly alternatives:
Traditional dissection doesn’t provide an optimal learning experience: more than two dozen published studies show, collectively, that students assigned alternatives are likely to learn more than their cohorts who dissect preserved specimens (http://www.humanelearning.info/papers/papers_comparative.htm).
Dissection isn’t the most economical option: cost analyses show that schools can save hundreds to thousands of dollars by switching from dissecting equipment and non-reusable animal specimens to computer simulations, 3-D models and other alternatives.
Dissection isn’t very eco-friendly: most frogs destined for the dissection tray are taken from wild populations in vulnerable wetland habitats. Frogs are vital cogs in wetland food-webs, and many populations are in serious decline. Well-documented declines in both bullfrog and leopard frog populations have occurred in the US and Canada, and dissection supply has recently been credited with the collapse of frog populations in Egypt.
Dissection isn’t healthy for students: formaldehyde is a known human carcinogen.
Finally, dissection doesn’t produce doctors. Almost ninety percent of U.S. medical schools—including nearly every top-ranked institution—do not use live (or dead) animals in their curriculum.
So, why does frog dissection persist in science classrooms? One reason is the inertia of tradition: most science teachers were themselves taught with dissections, so it’s familiar to them. Another reason is ignorance of the above facts. Just last week a top flight biology teacher defended her use of animal dissections by saying: "I wouldn’t want a surgeon working on me who had only worked on a simulation" (http://www.seacoastonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070614/LIFE/706140362/-1/OPINION04).
With beliefs like that, the frogs are going to need all the help they can get.
Resources:
http://www.hsus.org/animals_in_research/animals_in_education/use_of_animals_in_higher_education/
http://www.interniche.org/
Please copy the 5 symbols from this security code image into the box below to submit comment.
About | Privacy policy | Terms & conditions
© 1995-2009 All rights reserved
