Every year in the U.S., an estimated 20 million animals are killed so that students can cut up their corpses in archaic and unnecessary classroom dissection lessons. And millions of impressionable students are required or pressured to take part in this desecration of dead animals, which can be traumatic and risks desensitizing them to animals’ suffering. This cruelty is a far cry from God’s call to kind stewardship in Proverbs 12:10: “The righteous care for the needs of their animals, but the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel.” God didn’t create animals for us to use in any way, and dissection is a cruel practice that teaches students that animals are mere objects to callously disembowel and dispose of like meaningless garbage.
Each animal used for dissection has a tragic past. Some were bred by suppliers, and others were captured from their homes in the wild. Every year, millions of frogs—the most commonly dissected animals in U.S. schools—are violently taken from their natural habitats and thrown into bags with no food or water and little oxygen. Many of them suffocate or are crushed to death or sustain serious injuries while being transported to their deaths. The cats and dogs used in dissection are often abandoned companion animals or were sold to suppliers by animal shelters that didn’t want them.
PETA investigators have uncovered rampant animal abuse at biological supply companies. Animals are gassed en masse and injected with formaldehyde to stop the decomposition process. Investigators found workers at these operations injecting animals with formaldehyde without confirming that they were dead, causing some of them to die slowly and painfully. They also taunted and tortured the terrified animals, spitting in their faces and prolonging their deaths by holding their heads underwater and bringing them to the surface right before they lost consciousness. What a frightening reminder of the wicked in Proverbs 12:10, whose hearts are without kindness.
For students, dissection can be a psychologically damaging experience. For many of them, slicing into the body of a dead animal is deeply traumatic, and an estimated 25% of students oppose this practice. And the harmful message that this sends—namely, that cruelty is acceptable—makes dissection a possible gateway to harming animals and eventually other humans. Law enforcement and educators have noted that cruelty to animals is on the rise among young people, and research shows that approximately 43% of school shooters first committed acts of cruelty against animals. Normalizing cruelty through dissection only exacerbates this crisis.
Dissecting animals is not only cruel but also entirely unnecessary. Many superior, cruelty-free alternatives exist to teach students about biology, and many states already have dissection-choice policies that require teachers to provide a humane, non-animal alternative if requested to do so. Software options include programs by Biosphera and Expandable Mind, and the Kind Frog™ is a realistic model that accurately mimics the tissues, organs, and skeletal structure of a real frog.
Teaching students compassion helps them become kind adults, and cruelty-free dissection methods are better for everyone. The gentle, sensitive animals who are killed by the millions for cruel science experiments deserve to live free in the homes that God provides for them, and according to Psalm 150:6, they are all sentient individuals capable of praising the Lord, just like us. So please, for the love of God, cut out dissection!
