'Virtual dissections' will save millions of animals

By PAULA MOORE
KNIGHT RIDDER/TRIBUNE
In her new book about John Hunter, the "Father of Modern Surgery," biographer Wendy Moore relates how Hunter paid body snatchers to exhume human remains so that he could dissect them. She describes in detail Hunter's gruesome, sometimes bizarre, experiments on live animals -- such as pouring warm milk directly into the intestines of a live dog. Throughout his career in the 1700s, Hunter cut apart countless live animals to study their internal systems.
However one feels about Hunter's grisly explorations, one thing is certain -- we've moved beyond this kind of horrendous dissection. It is now time to move away from dissections in the classroom, as well.
Despite the availability of sophisticated alternatives -- including new computer programs that allow students to find, remove and study organs with a "computer mouse," instead of a scalpel -- millions of animals are cruelly killed for classroom dissections every year.
Companion animals
Biological supply houses, which sell animals for dissections and classroom experiments, breed mice and rats, obtain fetal pigs from slaughterhouses, capture frogs from the wild and pick up lost or stray dogs and cats from the streets. When People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals went undercover at one biological supply company, our investigator was told that some of the cats killed there were companion animals who had "escaped" from their homes.
Live animals at this company were painfully injected with formaldehyde -- a severely irritating, caustic substance. Rats kicked furiously even after the skin was pulled back from their necks to their midsections. One rabbit, still alive after being gassed, tried to crawl out of a wheelbarrow full of water and dead rabbits. Workers laughed as the animal was drowned.
This disrespect for life carries over into the classroom, where students get the message that animals are nothing but teaching tools, to be killed, cut up and discarded. Educators who insist that there is "no substitute" for animal dissections need to talk to their students. They might be surprised by what they learn -- and what the students do not.
Rick Hill, a former high school science teacher and co-founder of the "virtual dissection" company Froguts, did just that. When he asked his stepdaughter about a frog dissection she had performed in school, "she had a hard time describing the organs in detail," Hill says. Hill began considering ways that the dissection experience could be simulated, allowing students to repeat procedures as many times as necessary -- "without wasting another batch of frogs."
Froguts, one of several companies now offering dissection software, is used in hundreds of schools across the country. Point-and-click scalpels, scissors and saws let students dissect and examine frogs, fetal pigs, cats, squids, cows' eyes, and more without ever smelling formaldehyde.
Non-animal methods
There was a time when classroom dissections went unchallenged, but more and more students are demanding the right to use humane non-animal methods. Nearly a dozen states, including Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania, Florida and California, along with numerous school districts, have enacted laws or policies protecting a student's right not to dissect. The rest need to follow suit.
Science has progressed greatly since John Hunter's day. Researchers now use 3-D tissue models of eyes and skin, derived from human cells, to determine if chemicals will cause irritation. In the U.K., "microdosing" -- giving human volunteers minute doses of test drugs and tracking them through the body -- is being tested with great success.
Isn't it time that the science being taught in our classrooms catches up?
X Paula Moore is senior writer for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Norfolk, Va. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.