I remember dissection and other animal experiments in high school biology class all too well. I was disgusted by the project that required students to catch insects, kill them with ether and then pierce their bodies with sharp pins so they could be stuck into a Styrofoam board. Many of the students’ bugs died by suffocation sealed in airtight jars over the weekend before making it to class on Monday. Students were to go through a hierarchical identification procedure and label the “specimens.” This exercise easily could have been done with photographs or models instead, with the same educational result. Little was gained by the students in collecting, killing and mounting the insects, especially when the point of the assignment was to be able to identify the animals’ taxonomy. At the end of the assignment, all the bodies of the dead, impaled insects were dumped in the trash.

Even more sickening to me was the dissection assignment. Our 10th-grade class experimented on earthworms, frogs and crayfish. I can’t specifically remember how the earthworms arrived at the school, if they were already dead or if the class was supposed to kill them before experimenting on them, but the frogs were already dead and preserved in formaldehyde, and the crayfish were delivered alive. Several teenage boys disturbingly crushed live crayfish in plastic bags with books and other heavy objects just to see what would happen. Other kids gruesomely disemboweled and mutilated the frogs far beyond what was required by the instructions for the assignment. (Remember, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer tortured cats for fun before turning his attention to people, more proof of the link between animal cruelty and human violence.)

There were three reactions to my classroom dissection experiment: traumatic horror, callous indifference or grotesque fascination. None of these were beneficial to the students or for teaching respect for animals and nature. For me, these exercises were more like emotional abuse than education, but we did not have the choice of opting out of these assignments.

Students today have more options. Nine states have student choice laws related to classroom dissection, and many other school boards have local policies allowing students to use non-animal alternatives. In addition, there are a variety of nonprofit organizations that provide information and resources for families that want to approach schools about changing their policies to be more inclusive of cruelty-free alternatives.