European Network of Individuals and Campaigns for Humane Education
There is a growing movement to provide a high quality, humane approach
to teaching biological science and human and veterinary medicine.
In
this positive tradition, students learn using a combination of teaching
methods ranging from multimedia computer simulation to self-testing
on themselves and fellow students.
For direct experience of animals, students practice observational work
on living animals, perform healing intervention on those which are sick,
and use the bodies of others which have died naturally. In some establishments,
however, many students continue to face compulsory and harmful animal use.
Dissecting the negative tradition
These methods cause widespread suffering and death to countless frogs,
fish, rats and other animals every year. They teach disrespect for life
because the animals are considered disposable tools, and in some countries
they disturb the environment from where many animals are sourced.
Although most students will never use animals in their future careers,
they are encouraged or coerced into performing dissection and vivisection
and into conducting sometimes very painful experiments, contrary to their
ethical beliefs. Some students are forced to change discipline or drop
out of university altogether because courses have been designed with no
facility to choose educationally valid alternatives.
Others find it easier to abandon criticism, losing a healthy scientific
attitude and allowing the subjugation of their ethics. This perpetuates
the problem and desensitises students to the important values of personal
responsibility and respect for life. And the professions lose the very
people who are keen to keep ethics within science.
Transforming education
The evidence from other universities is clear: students can and do complete
their degrees without any violation of their freedom
of conscience and without harming an animal.
So as teachers, students, campaigners and legislators we should be
working to harmonise with such good practice by challenging and abandoning
negative tradition and by supporting the growing movement towards a humane
science.
contact@ong.ro
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Last updated: 12- I - 1998. Copyright © CRCI
- ONG 1998
