Science Can Be Kind

An exploration of nonhuman animal dissection sourcing and alternatives

“Now, if you want, you can take your finger, lift the flap covering the left ventricle, and reach all the way up through the aorta. This is where the oxygenated blood gets pumped out so it can be distributed to the rest of your body.”

Staring at the tip of my blue glove peeking out through the top of the artery, I take a deep breath, and something clicked. This structure that I am holding in my hand is the same as the one in my chest, that has been there my entire life, pumping blood throughout my body and keeping me alive. What looked like just a lump of tissue a second ago was actually one of the most graceful, complex, and yet beautifully simple pieces of circuitry I had ever laid eyes on. During this eighth grade anatomy lab, I discovered my appreciation for biological systems, and from that day on, I knew I wanted to be a scientist.

Seven years later, dissections have continued to represent pivotal moments in my scientific career: drawing the ink out of the pen of a squid, tracing the muscles that control the wings of a bird, seeing shark fetuses, and most recently, holding a human brain. In my neuroscience class, we even got to stain sections of a cow brain and watch the structures that we had spent hours studying appear right in front of us. These experiences have driven my love for science, but as I throw out my gloves after each lab, guilt washes over me. 

For some labs, the feeling w as strong. In one of my biology classes abroad, all of the specimens were sourced from a nearby museum, some of them up to 50 years old. I could picture the hundreds or even thousands of students that had worked with and learned from them before me, and feel a little more justified in my use of the animals. I could think about all of the lives saved and the species conserved with the knowledge that other students and I had gained. Unfortunately, though, this has not been the case for most of the dissections I have participated in. I’ve tried to block out the thoughts of where the animals are sourced from and how many lives are taken, but that ignorance is not responsible science.

So, where are dissection specimens usually sourced from? What are the laws regulating those industries? What are the alternatives to dissections, and how effective are they as learning tools?

Colorado College sources most of its dissection specimens from a company called Carolina Scientific, so if you have ever performed a dissection here, you were probably using a specimen from this company. They source everything: frogs, dogs, dogfish sharks, cats, fetal pigs, sheep organs, cow organs, and more. Scrolling through their website is actually quite shocking, with brains that you can add to your cart for $10.50. The overall display looks disconcertingly similar to any other online shopping website. 

The one thing that isn’t quite as easy to find on their website is the source of their specimens. I eventually found some information on their FAQ page. Above explanations of their sources, they have a statement about USDA compliance, stating that they “are committed to treating all animals in a humane manner.” They then state that the sharks and worms that they provide are “dead when [they] purchase them” from fishing and bait companies. They get cats from animal shelters that were going to euthanize them anyways, fetal pigs from slaughterhouses that were going to throw them out, and frogs from a farmland area for the frog leg industry that has seen “a large increase in the frog population.”

This FAQ section, however, leaves out a large number of species that are listed on their website, so I went searching for more information. The Products Safety and Compliance Manager was happy to give it to me. Dogs, it turns out, are also sourced from government-operated and regulated shelters, cow and sheep organs are byproducts of slaughterhouses, and rabbits come from commercial rabbit breeders. He added that these rabbits “would have been destined for food use had we not diverted them for educational use.”

This seemed to be the motto of this company: they were dead already, or they were going to die anyways, so why not use them for science?And why not use them for science? If they were going to be thrown out or eaten otherwise, isn’t it better to use them? That way, their deaths can create knowledge, and that knowledge can aid conservation and the treatment of disease—so isn’t that a good thing? Doesn’t that make their deaths more meaningful?

Your answer to these questions really depends on how you view the rigidity of the broader network of animal commodification, and whether or not it is possible to change the way animals are treated. This dissection company, and likely the rest of the dissection industry, has created some good out of a rather violent pre-existing situation. And in doing so, it has removed itself from any responsibility for the initial violence towards the animals that they source. They didn’t kill the animals themselves; they just saved their bodies from going to waste.

So, although it is sad that dogs and cats get euthanized at animal shelters and that cows and pigs and sheep get killed at slaughterhouses every day, is it the fault of the dissection company? You could argue that they are improving the outcome of a problematic situation, but you could also argue that they are providing moral justification to that system, and therefore cementing the avenues of this exploitation. Thinking from the perspective of people working in those animal shelters and slaughterhouses, might pulling the trigger be easier if you knew that at least this body could be used for learning? And from the perspective of the consumer, might it feel less wrong to buy a dog from a breeder or eat meat if you know that the death resulting from your actions isn’t being completely wasted and that you may be contributing to science? 

The larger the system becomes, the easier it is to justify. Even outside of the context of sourcing animals for dissection, the slaughterhouses they come from provide jobs, and the farmers who raise the animals destined for slaughter would also be out of work without the meat industry. Additionally, the animals have been bred and genetically modified to reproduce at this scale anyways, and they don’t have a habitat in the wild anymore, so isn’t it our responsibility to make use of them?

So how does dissection fit into this, at the end of this long line of exploitation? That’s the tricky part. As a student, you see the end result specimen, and you might feel conflicted about this death, but what can you do? This is how the system works, and further, howthe scientific community works. To become a scientist, at some point, you are going to have to dissect an animal. Even if you opt out of your dissections in high school, if you want to go into the medical field, you’re going to have to do dissections in medical or veterinary school. If you can’t do them in college, the ingrained societal voice in your head might ask whether you really have the stomach to be a doctor. Or if you’re going into research and you don’t want to dissect, much less kill an animal, then you might think that you should pick a different field. If you’re not committed enough to uncover valuable scientific knowledge to kill an animal, then you might question whether you care enough about saving lives (human lives, to be more specific). And even if you might have the power to conduct humane research once you’re a tenured professor, you’re not going to get there unless you endure some inhumane research internships and graduate school projects along the way.

The scientific field incentivizes the harming of animals and pressures you to demonstrate that you’re able to do so. Many times, I have felt conflicted about participating in a dissection, but have weighed it against the respect I might lose from my professor, who might be a mentor that I want to help me pursue my scientific career. For this reason, qualms about dissection can be easily silenced, and students can underestimate how many other students feel just as unsure. 

If you are a student pursuing science that has ever felt conflicted about dissecting animals, or if you are not pursuing science because you didn’t want to dissect and thought that disqualified you from being a scientist, or if you never wanted to pursue science, but have participated in and felt unsure about dissections, I am here to tell you that feeling that way is okay. In fact, it’s normal. And it is also very normal to have suppressed those feelings and feign excitement about dissections. Trying to appreciate an animal by exploiting it is a very paradoxical way to learn, and it is only because of the immensity of this system that we have come to see it as normal.

But there are many students who have felt conflicted about dissecting. One study in Morocco found that 39.1% of lower secondary school students did not agree with the use of animals in life sciences education. Because of students like these, many states in the US have Student Choice Laws that prevent elementary, middle, and high schools from penalizing students for not participating and require teachers to provide learning alternatives. Unfortunately, these are only in some states, and do not extend to college students, but many universities have created similar policies. 

CC does not have such a policy, but we do have very understanding and thoughtful professors. The few that I have spoken to have been very open when talking about the issues surrounding dissection. Over the years, they have done all that they can to reduce seemingly extraneous dissections and the number of specimens ordered, but still see immense value in dissection labs. They have been open to talking to me about my issues with certain labs, and I’m sure would be equally receptive to the concerns of other students. Part of the problem is that there is a general discomfort around the issue, so not many people are talking about it at all. We can do better as an institution.

First, we should be approaching each lab with full knowledge of where the specimens come from, and we should always ask whether or not the lab is completely necessary. The Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) is usually the voice advocating for alternatives to the use of animals, but they only regulate live-animal use, so dissection is instead regulated by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).  The USDA focuses more on the sourcing process and does not regulate the actual use of the specimens. As an educational institution, Colorado College is able to order however many specimens we think we need. It is up to the students and professors to be stringent about this quantity.

There are alternatives to dissection. However, many alternatives are quickly discounted because of the institutional strength of dissection as a scientific tradition. The National Association of Biology Teachers “supports the use of these materials as adjuncts to the educational process but not as exclusive replacements for the use of actual organisms.” Many alternatives are dismissed because of how new and underdeveloped they are, but as technology advances, more and more sophisticated dissection alternatives are becoming available, and we should give them a chance.

One alternative to ordering from a dissection company that still allows for physical contact with a specimen is to use well-preserved specimens like those from the museum that I used for my biology class in Australia. The lab’s focus was all orders of terrestrial vertebrates (mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians), and the specimens were preserved in a variety of ways. Some were stuffed, some were just skeletons, some were just furs and skins, and others were chemically preserved as whole or partially dissected organism. While wearing gloves (to minimize degradation of the specimens), we were able to pick all of them up, move them around, and interact in essentially the same way as we would with a newly dissected specimen. There were additional benefits to this type of variety, since you could observe the skeletal structure of a body region in one specimen, and the exterior and interior morphology of the same body region in another.

There is a similar opportunity at CC, due to our extensive collections of birds, mammals, and insects. The school has a similar variety of skins, skulls, skeletons, eggs, and nests of birds and mammals. The collections cover 425 species of birds (700 total specimens) and all mammalian orders found in Colorado. I personally was able to use the bird collection during my ornithology class. Again, with the ability to pick up and manipulate any of the structures (with gloves of course), I was able to learn a lot about external bill, wing, and feet morphology, along with the internal skeletal and muscular morphology. The bird collection was assembled from 1860-1950, and the specimens are still intact today. This option reduces the need to order new specimens for every single lab, and provides an additional level of variation for students to learn from. Furthermore, the longevity of the specimens allows the time to source deceased animals from local zoos, wildlife rehab centers, or other locations that promote animal welfare and conservation. There are other alternatives, though, that don’t involve the use of any animals.

The first is of course online websites, videos, and tutorials. Carolina Scientific sells a software called eMind that allows you to virtually interact with all the specimens that you could have ordered from their site. For example, you can click through the digestive anatomy of a frog, and when you click on a structure, it will tell you what it’s called and what its function is. There are similar websites listed on Colorado College’s website for the neuroscience course that allow you to learn nervous system tracts by going through images of brain slices. These sites will quiz you on the tracts and structures, and have information about names and functions stored for easy accessibility.

Websites and software like these are widely available for most specimens and systems you might need to learn, but how do they compare to dissection? They have the obvious benefit of not harming animals, but they also have a lot more information readily available information. Many have the built-in function of quizzing you, and best of all, they allow more individual and continuous access. During a lab, you might share a specimen with another student, and you may only have an hour or two to spend on the dissection, but with these websites, you can access them on your own time and go through them at your own pace. The only question remaining is how much does the kinesthetic aspect of a dissection matter: does being able to physically manipulate structures drastically improve learning?

A study done in Australia (where legislation requires the use of alternatives where appropriate) compared actual dissection with alternatives in undergraduate human anatomy and physiology courses and found that they were generally equally effective. Of course, this is just one study. Many still advocate for the role of kinesthetic learning in dissection labs, which many alternatives still incorporate.

One example is right here at CC: plastination. In the Introductory Psychology brain anatomy lab, instead of using cow or sheep brains, we use plastinated brains. These are real, donated human brains that have been treated with a series of chemicals that cause the tissue to feel like plastic, but retain its form very accurately. They can be picked up, and turned over, and they are split into the two hemispheres, so you can view the cortex as well as the subcortical structures like the thalamus, corpus callosum, hypothalamus, ventricles, etc. These have the benefit of showing the amount of individual variation in brain structure, allowing the students to practice structure identification on highly varied specimens. Another benefit is that they do not need to be kept in any special chemicals or location. They are always available in the brain anatomy lab, and students can use them to study whenever they need.

Plastination can also be used on other organs besides the brain, and even medical schools are using plastinated organs to teach anatomy. One study found that 39% of medical schools use plastinated specimens for education, but the main reason for not using them was that they don’t provide the same learning experience as the physical dissecting process. The same could be argued for the brains at CC. In the neuroscience course, to further students’ understanding of neuroanatomy, they dissect and stain a cow brain, and are thus able to cut apart the brain themselves, watch the structures appear, and get practice locating them in a more dynamic and challenging environment. Is this something that can ever be replicated by a dissection alternative?

There is one very new alternative that comes extremely close to actual dissection: virtual reality. This method provides not only the abundance of information associated with structures, but it allows for both the kinesthetic manipulation of specimens and the physical act of uncovering less superficial structures. The use of this alternative is actually already in the works at CC. The XR Club, run by Galen Duran and Madeline Smith, has been using the technology to run review sessions for human anatomy students, one of which I attended.

With the software for human anatomy, you step into a room with a skeleton in front of you, and you have an entire wall of options. You opt for looking at bones, muscles, nerves, vasculature, movement, or an individual system. Whatever you select appears in front of you, and you can walk around it (even through it, as one student discovered by sticking her head into the ribcage of a skeleton), select structures to get more information about their function, and even pull them apart. As a neuroscience major, I of course pulled up the brain (cranial nerves and vasculature included), and took off the cerebral cortex, then the thalamus, and then I took half of the cerebellum out and rotated it around so that I could look at all sides of it including my favorite view: a sagittal cross section. The clarity of it was spectacular, and I could see each branch of the tree-like organization of the cells in the cerebellum.

As I stuck around to observe, other students used the software to overlay different systems that they had only studied individually, and said that it helped them better visualize how everything related. For example, viewing the nerves, muscles, and bones of the legs all at once and being able to remove different structures to see the deeper muscles was a great study tool. All of the information in the simulation shows up on a TV screen, so if you have a learning assistant or professor nearby, they can see what you’re seeing and answer any questions you may have.

These review sessions, according to Smith, are very new and just starting to gain popularity, but so far the professors have been quite receptive to it. Medical schools have already started utilizing more advanced versions of this technology to practice dissections, and with its continued development, these versions will only get cheaper. In the future, undergraduate students could be completing entire dissections virtually.

For now, though, the XR club is working to increase awareness and accessibility of this technology by hosting these review sessions and looking into other VR packages. The goal for the anatomy program isn’t to replace the cadaver lab, since those are ethically and willfully donated, but in the context of nonhuman animal dissections, this option could be a promising alternative. VR packages for nonhuman animals are sold by our favorite company, Carolina Biological (partnered with VictoryVR), and they even come with a virtual professor that will review the structures with you when your professor isn’t available. The packages so far include cats and frogs, but more species are in the works. One consideration with these options is that they still have to use many animals to perfect the virtual image, but once the package is developed, it can be used indefinitely.

If you are feeling conflicted about performing dissections, there are definitely alternatives. The questions that remain are just how willing professors are to adopt them, and how far they will take you in your scientific education. For example, if you are studying to become a doctor, will there always be a point at which you have to stop using alternatives—or could the technology become so advanced that we could train doctors solely using alternatives and donated human cadavers? The same goes for future researchers. If they don’t practice on real animals, will that then decrease their ability when working with real subjects in a research lab? With the rate that technology is advancing though, it seems that alternatives will be put into practice at higher and higher levels. And ultimately, how effective these alternatives are is determined by the students using them, so it is up to us to be vocal about what we want our learning to look like.

As we start replacing dissections with alternatives, it’s important to consider how the use of these alternatives will impact animal welfare as a whole. Due to how far removed the dissection specimens are from their original source, alternatives may not directly reduce the death of animals, but removing a justification for animal exploitation could discourage both producers and consumers in other sectors such as the meat and breeding industries. Furthermore, removing this violence against animals, especially for younger students, could chip away at this ingrained mindset that we develop from the normalization of nonhuman animal exploitation.

To me, science doesn’t have to involve flexing how tolerant you are of exploiting animals. Many scientists, such as Lori Marino, who is coming to talk at CC in Block 7, have used science to gain a better understanding of the worlds of other species, and have used that information to protect them. She does research on the brains of cetaceans (whales and dolphins) in order to demonstrate why they should not be kept in captivity. The more we know about other species, and the more we know about technology and alternatives that can reduce their suffering, the more responsibility we have to do so.

Science is about gaining an appreciation for the world around us, and in that way, it’s inherently empathetic. This is what we should be passing on to future generations: science can be kind, science can be transparent, science is ever-evolving and can grow to incorporate new alternatives. Science is about breaking down old paradigms and saving all lives—not just human ones.

By Courtney Knerr

Art by Jessie Sheldon

 Body Issue | February 2020