Frog Desecration

Frog dissection is a very cruel act that I think should be banned. I recently had the terrible experience of looking at the insides of the dead, bloodless frog soaked in preservatives in science class.

When I walked in the science classroom, as the whole class had been anticipating for the past two weeks, there was a tray and a little container holding pointy dissection tools and scissors waiting for us at our desks. My science teacher walked to each of our tables, practically throwing the soggy dead frogs onto our trays. Our male teacher said to the co-ed class, "Now girls, don't be scared, it's already dead, it can't hurt you."

My lab partner kept on prodding the corpse with a sharp metal thing saying, "I can't wait to cut it open!" And on the second day when we cut the belly open and opened the skin and muscle like little doors, I couldn't take it. I asked to sit at the table in the back. The teacher's assistant, a full grown woman in her 50s, approached me, and in an attempt to comfort me, asked me why I was upset. I explained that frog dissection takes away from the frog population which is already the world's fastest declining population, and that their destroyed carcasses were going to be thrown on top of the endless rotting mess of some landfill to slowly decompose. She looked at me blankly, either unable or unwilling to comprehend. She said, "Well, that's an invalid reason. You're just doing this to get attention. Please go back to your table and finish dissecting the frog." After I got over the initial shock of her words, I explained to her very politely that I wasn't trying to get attention and that what I had said did make sense.

Then she compared the frog to chicken, saying that not all parts of a chicken get eaten, and as long as the frogs are decomposing, it's good: “Decomposed things make great soil.” She also mentioned she eats boiled chicken heart and liver. Oh, and that people compost (which was totally off topic because these frogs were not going to be composted). Even though I didn't understand her strange comparison, I just nodded my head nicely while secretly thinking, Is she crazy? How the heck are decomposed frogs covered in preservatives in a LANDFILL mixed with plastic, glass, and other nasty things supposed to be used as soil?

Thankfully, in the end, she let me sit at a different table for most of the dissection process. The whole time, though, I was thinking about how some people are so willfully ignorant about anything that would reflect badly on their institution or themselves.

Hopefully schools, frog farms, and frog distributors will come to their senses and stop this terrible practice. There are several online programs that allow students to virtually dissect frogs, which is very beneficial to the environment, to us, and to frogs.

This article was posted on Michael Moore's website in the High School Newspaper section. To visit his website, click on this link> http://mikeshighschoolnews.com/blogs/styleshaker/02/20/2011/frog-desecration

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT FROGS AND FROG DISSECTION VISIT THIS WEBSITE: http://www.savethefrogs.com/

Together we can save the frogs and keep them from going extinct!