When 98 percent of medical schools don’t use animal dissection, it’s safe to assume that cutting open dead animals isn’t necessary to become a brilliant doctor. In fact, studies show that being forced to participate in animal dissection can actually scare students away from pursuing a career in science!
So if dissection isn’t actually teaching you anything, what does it do to you? Here’s a shocker: Studies suggest that cutting up dead cats, rats, frogs, and pigs in classrooms can foster callousness toward animals and nature.
Not convinced that dissection is pretty much pointless? Here are 10 photos posted on Instagram (and for some, the captions that were posted with them) to prove it.
Warning: These photos are graphic and upsetting. We’ve protected the identities of the people involved—we all were guilty of using animals in one way or another before we knew better. Now we’re calling on YOU to help keep corpses out of classrooms.
Caption: “Chopping up eyes on a Monday morning as per usual.“
Student looks at a cow fetus and uses this hashtag: “#yum”?! How about no.
Caption: “The phrase: “#Eating your #heart out just became a lot more #real..“
In his caption, he chose this hashtag: “#jealous“…? No.
“#scienceporn”?!
Caption: “My inner sociopath coming out“
This plastic-wrapped cat in your dissection tray might have been a lost, family cat or else came from a shelter:
This frog was probably captured from his home in the wild, tossed into a bag and killed so he could wind up in your classroom:
This baby pig was probably cut out of her mom, in the slaughterhouse, and killed before taking even one breath:
Caption: “World Meet Bacon.”
If these photos make you sick, I feel you—dissection day at my high school sent me into panic mode. My textbook was telling me to apply pressure to the knife and cut a 6-inch lateral incision down the length of this black cat’s abdomen. My gut told me this was wrong. Where did the cat come from? How did she get here? How did she die? Something in my mind—my ego, probably—told me to stop being a baby and join my classmates.
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