• Question: Do you disect animals?

    Asked by to Clare, Divya, Ian, Jess, Lewis on 17 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Jess Smith

      Jess Smith answered on 17 Mar 2014:

      No I don’t directly.

      In my undergraduate I had to dissect some cow feet which was a bit gross- we were looking at tendon injuries. The rest of those cows were already being used for meat, so there weren’t ethical issues with that.

      Other people I work with do animal dissections. Those animals (rats and sheep) are bred to be used in science. Some people find this difficult, but the drugs we test on animals are then used to help millions of people and animals. The animals are looked after very, very well- with vets and ‘happiness’ monitors making sure that they aren’t distressed. In the UK it is illegal to test on any primates. We also eat more chickens in the UK each year, than the total number of animals that we have ever used in animal testing (just to give you a sense of scale!)

    • Photo: Lewis Dean

      Lewis Dean answered on 17 Mar 2014:

      No, I don’t get to do animal dissections any more. When I was a student we did a four afternoons where we dissected different animals. My group had to dissect pheasants and chickens to look at how pheasants can fly, but chickens aren’t very good at flying. By the fourth afternoon the room was pretty smelly!

    • Photo: Ian Hands-Portman

      Ian Hands-Portman answered on 17 Mar 2014:

      No I don’t but I do eat meat and I do gut my own food sometimes, usually just fish but I once did a whole deer – that was messy and hard work.

    • Photo: Clare Nevin

      Clare Nevin answered on 17 Mar 2014:

      I have done dissections on chick embryos and tiny flies which are used as model organisms in biology. I did a rat dissection during my A-levels which smelled pretty bad but other than that I have not.

    • Photo: Divya Venkatesh

      Divya Venkatesh answered on 18 Mar 2014:

      No but I used to. I used to study how the heart was formed during development to find out more about what goes wrong when babies have heart defects. I used to dissect out mouse embryos 8-14 days old (full development takes about 20-21 days) — the smaller ones were quite tricky because they are so fragile.

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