Has anyone in your family been affected by cancer, diabetes or frankly any other disease that they needed medical assistance for? If so, you know that the people in the medical field are truly heroes. These doctors and medical professionals were once just like us—high school students staring uneasily at an animal they had to dissect, second-guessing the virtue of it. But every time they save a patient or bring a child into this world, they realize that it was the right decision because they needed the practice and the education that comes with dissection.

As a student who is interested in pursuing a career in medicine, I feel like dissections  like those of fetal pigs in anatomy are something that really do help me learn, and it would be a deprivation if it wasn’t available to students. Had it not been for animal dissections, we wouldn’t be anywhere near as medically knowledgeable as we are now. Centuries of animal research allow us to stay healthy. If people a hundred years ago stopped testing on animals, the 25.8 million people who have diabetes in America may be dead because injectable insulin may not have been created. While there are other ways of testing new advancements, none of them have been as effective as using animals. When we think of diseases like cancer and AIDS, we know that the medical field will always need to progress. In order to continue moving forward, it is necessary to sacrifice animals.

I think the thing that bothers most people is that these animals are killed with the intention of being dissected. Yet the alternative isn’t much different. If the pigs weren’t used for our education, they would be used for someone else’s food. There aren’t very many other ways to get animals for dissection. It’s impractical to use animals that died a natural death because the quantity would be limited and the animals wouldn’t be preserved properly.

Although I do agree that simulations of dissections should be available to students who don’t want to participate, there are some aspects that they will miss out on. For example, the student wouldn’t get to feel the resistance of flesh while cutting with a scalpel.

The dissection of animals should be considered a sacrosanct necessity for learning and the advancement of medical sciences. By continuing to provide hands-on learning experiences like this one, our school is allowing us to achieve the highest form of education, which we should be proud of. At the same time, such resources should be respected and valued; these animal fetuses are not objects to be toyed with.

The views in this column do not necessarily reflect the views of the HiLite staff. Reach Nida Khan at [email protected].