By MADDIE KIRKMAN
Staff Writer
Schools all over the world dissect animals. They do this for scientific purposes and many students find it extremely interesting. There is one thing to dissect a frog or a chicken foot, but pets are extremely unacceptable. I found it hard to believe that schools are genuinely okay with this, but until I had to dissect a cat in my anatomy class, I realized how messed up the system is. They made it mandatory for students in anatomy classes to dissect cats. This is ridiculous and traumatizing. I feel extremely uncomfortable and upset when I have to do this project, and there is no way out besides dropping the class. It sucks because I find this class really fun, besides the dissection of pets. I really don’t want to have to drop the class, but they shouldn’t make students dissect pets. This can be tormenting to some cat lovers, like me. The worst part is, they warned us not to post any pictures of the dissection because multiple people and companies disagree with this situation and can sue. A student once posted a picture of the dead cat on their board and they got sued by the company. This is the reason why they shouldn’t even risk having the students dissect these types of animals. Not all of the animals died of natural causes either. One of the cats that was dissected got shot with a BB gun. The cat we dissected was pregnant and had a chip in it. Our teacher took the chip in and found out some information about the cat. We found out the cat’s name, which was Midge, and she was 5 years old from Wisconsin. Knowing all of this information about the cat that we are dissecting made it even harder to do it. It made me feel even more emotional than I already was. VUSD schools should change that rule. Cat lovers should stick together and help put an end to cat dissection.