Quote Originally Posted by karley View Post
Just throwing this out there: I'm a huge animal lover, have had a dog or cat in the house since before I could talk. However, dissection was the most interesting, and down right fun section of biology for me. I volunteered to dissect a pregnant cat and was enthralled with it. Now that may just be my personal fascination with figuring out how things work, but I loved it.
I didn't like disection, it was several kinds of ick, but I wouldn't have missed it. You can learn just so much from books and pictures, then you have to study the real thing.

But I did learn to worry about the morality of sacrificing animals just to be studied. Later, in University, one of the things that convinced me I could never be a research biologist was when we had a practical involving muscle respiration: so we were supposed to go to the tech counter and say "One rat please," and the tech would take a rat from a cageful, whack its head on the edge of the bench and hand it over. Just so we could disect out a postage-stamp size slip of diaphram muscle and study it in a test tube. That was about twenty rats killed that day so we could do our experiment, and it felt wrong.
In all of my high school level classes there was always an opportunity to opt out of dissection or just be a passive observer, rather than actually doing the cutting. It seemed to work well for the more squeamish of the class.
My son is supposed to be allowed to opt out of disection - watching as well as doing it - but the teacher sprang a surprise session on them because a cow heart had become available, and wouldn't let him leave. He was sick, so I think she'll be more considerate next time. Study is important, but it should't be an emotional ordeal.
I wouldn't give up the opportunity to dissect for anything, I feel as though it has been invaluable to my education.
It's true that there is far too little hands-on experience in modern education. All sorts of cool science experiments and craft projects are now only done by the teacher while the students look on, becasue the safety culture says they're too dangerous for students. But we did them and survived somehow.