Let us spare ourselves any details. Poll: Were you required to dissect . . .

. . . any animals or insects in elementary/grade/high school?

Please no gory details. I am curious.

I don't remember anyone having an issue with it. Dissecting the worm seemed more informative. The frog was kind of just filled with frog-glop. It might have been better to use fresh frogs, the one's we got were already dead and pickled in some kind of formaldehyde.

That one was interesting.

Frog and a sea cucumber. Didn't like it then, would refuse to do it now. That was Bio I. I hated science and that class. I didn't take Bio II, which IIRC, involved a fetal pig or something like that.

I took notes and "observed." And by "observed," I mean I pretended to look while I died a little inside. I felt bad for days afterward.

I never took Biology II. In that class, you had to dissect a cat and then they would have a "funeral" for the dissected cats (uncovered), where the students would take all the cats and go through every classroom in the school. Usually, there were rude comments and laughter. I'll never forget when I was in a freaking math class and they did that. That was also the first day I ever smoked pot (after seeing that and hearing some of the comments) and I never looked at my classmates the same way again. AFAIK, they still do that to this day. There was no fucking way I was taking that class. I knew then that I'd never become a veterinarian. Fuck that shit.

was the end of my hopes to be a vet too. I got the "well, if you want to help them, first you have to hurt them" in relation to vet school from the teacher. What an f'd up thing to try to figure out.

the animals or something. Why can't they make a replica model to let you dissect? I mean, if Hollywood can make movies where it looks "real," it looks like they could mass produce some specimens that could be put back together and reused. Now, THAT would be a REAL biology education. It's easy to take something apart, but can you put it back together and not have parts left over? I never understood the concept of dissection. I mean, it's only about destruction of a body.

With today's technology, they can send a camera in there and show videos of what healthy working lungs look like. Dead lungs don't teach you shit if you want your job to be keeping those lungs alive. Where's the logic in studying dead lungs? That's just an example.

I cannot get that episode of Oprah out of my head, the one where they had the human body parts laying out on a buffet table. Fucking Ewwwww! Show me a living working lung and I'll be interested. Dead stuff is dead stuff. Ack!

so many vet schools had "dog labs", abhorrent places where future purveyors of medicine learned on what were, honestly, tortured animals.

Seriously, if doctors learned how to set a broken leg by learning on some person bred to have their legs broken to be a med school subject, there'd have been riots.

I think that it's a bit easier now with models and simulation and lengthy internships. My day, not so much. Not complaining, as I'm thankful that things have changed for the better for the animals.

that they have now and we didn't have as many people fighting back against the cruelty.

And I did it. :(

Somehow a class full of 11th graders managed to be reasonably mature about the whole thing.


I still remember most of the musculature.

It was very interesting. I remember the kidneys and the liver.

You may have surmised that I was a very different person back then. A century ago.

Worms, frogs, and pigs. All in high school biology.

Worms and frogs in basic biology..I had Advanced Placement Biology which was a weeks long dissection..we could either do a fetal pig or a dogfish (small shark). I did the dogfish.

A worm, a frog, a crayfish, a grasshopper... all in high school

A fetal pig in college.

and my partner was more than happy to do the dissections. I distinctly remember someone throwing a frog bladder or stomach or something at me, though. Gross.

in addition to frogs, worms, etc.

and I threw up.

I did it. It was a cat. I named it Target.

I'm serious.

Schools forcing children to kill animals with knives would be as unthinkable here as making them wear white hoods and burn crosses.

I still can't wrap my mind around this.

You either are given a pre-dead frog by the teacher, or according to the movie ET, you put the frog in a jar with a cotton swab soaked with some chemocal (probably ether or chloroform) and it puts the frog to sleep.

I did a lot of extra reports.

I learned all the parts of a frog, from studying a drawing in the textbook. The dissection was an optional, extra credit assignment. I went to the library, instead of dissecting the frog, worm, and eyeball.

I'm not proud of that last one, at all.

We had to kill insects in 5th grade and pin them.

We had to dissect a cow eye in high school.

We had to dissect a heart in high school.

I think that was about it. :shrug:

College, we had to dissect ALL KINDS of horrific things. All while being looked down on by a LARGE fetus in a jar. God, that class was horrible. :scared:

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And the funny thing about it is that I'm not averse to dissections; I'm just averse to killing things IN ORDER TO dissect them. I'm a happy dissecting fool if something died of its own accord. Everything from mountain lions to loons, I'm all over it. But killing things in order to look at them? Gross. :(

Frankly, the whole dissection thing is what prevented me from going to medical school instead of getting a doctorate. Physiology was a big nothing, but the blood and guts? :puke:

Now, pharmacology. That's where I know my stuff. :rofl:

I should hook up with Track Palin. :thumbsup:

It was required but I'm sensitive to the smell of formaldehyde and as soon as they put the frog on the tray in front of me the smell made me vomit than quickly pass out. After the second attempt, I was excused from all dissection exercises. It quickly ended my HS career ambitions toward pathology as well.

In high school biology we had to do an earthworm and then a frog. The earthworm involved only very little cutting and that could be accomplished by my desk mate Ralph when the teacher was writing on the board. It was still disgusting. Then came the frog. We had lots of ponds around us where we played. I had seen lots of live frogs and that is how I liked to see them. But this pallid corpse belly up...no. It was just too much. Soon after we started the teacher said "I need someone to bring this book down to..any volunteers/", and my hand was up like a rocket. There may have been others. but he picked me and I set off, delivered the book and wandered around for the rest of the hour. I may have made up some drawings eventually, but not life, er, death, drawings. I will always be grateful to that teacher for that break. I know he saw my reaction to the task and I think he invented a break for me. I was a good student, never truant, sometimes sarcastic but I never made any excuse for disappearing & he never made any comment about it. I know he noticed; he never missed anything. I will always be grateful to him. I can still picture him now: crew cut, sinewy body, big wool pleated pants (not a guy who dressed up more than he could help), shirt and tie but no jacket. Good dude.

put into groups of 4. I just pretended to dissect. I never actually touched anything on the pig. I won't forget that smell though.

and we had to dissect earthworms, large grasshoppers, clams, fetal pigs, a cow's eye, frogs, a squid (group dissection), etc. and I hated it.

No go.

Cockroach in 10th grade.
Frog in high school.
Pigeon, worm, snail, and fish in college.
nothing in masters ( i moved to plants).
Chicken now in my phd program; i deal with everything from 4 days post fertilization, 11 days post fertilization, 1,2,3,4, days after hatch to full market age birds (6 weeks old).
but we dont really "dissect" anymore, we take out the organs we need (liver, pituitary, hypothalamus, etc).