Nobody knows how many animals are killed for dissection in classrooms. The National Anti-Vivisection Society puts it at an estimated 12 million a year in the United States alone, and is careful to say it is an estimate: statistics on animals used for dissection are simply not kept.1
Frogs are the most commonly dissected, with fish and sharks.1 In veterinary education the question every faculty eventually faces is the same: how much of this is teaching that could be done another way?
What the comparisons found
The most-cited answer is a review by Andrew Knight of every published comparison he could find between humane teaching methods and harmful animal use.2 Of eleven veterinary studies published between 1989 and 2006, five found the humane method gave better learning outcomes, five found them equivalent and one found them worse. Twenty-one studies outside veterinary medicine split the same way: 38.1% better, 52.4% as good, 9.5% worse.
That one worse result matters, and so does the size of the evidence. Eleven studies is not a large literature. What it does say clearly is that the burden of proof has moved: an animal used for a lesson that can be taught as well without it is hard to justify.
Three things that replace a tray
In practice the replacements are not one thing. Courses that have moved away from purpose-killed animals tend to combine three:
- Models and simulations, from plastinated specimens to three-dimensional atlases, for learning what is where and how it relates.
- Ethically sourced cadavers, animals that died naturally or were euthanised for their own welfare and donated by their owners, for the tissue a student needs to handle.
- Clinical skills labs and supervised work on living patients, for the skills that only hands and practice teach.
Vetomica is the first of those, and only the first. We built it so that the student who reaches the second and third already knows the anatomy well enough to learn from them.
What a screen cannot do
A model does not teach the resistance of fascia under a blade, the weight of a limb or how a living joint feels when it is unstable. Saying otherwise would be the kind of claim that makes faculty distrust the whole category.
What it can do is be there every time. A specimen that every student opens at once, that can be cut and the cut undone, that a lecturer can set up once and reuse every year, and that a student can return to the night before the exam: that is a different kind of teaching object from one animal on one afternoon, and for learning what is where, the studies say it is at least as good.