The mission is not to promote this one software, but to encourage schools to embrace any of the scores of online alternatives available, Kriger said. Rancho Verde, part of the Val Verde Unified School District, quickly jumped on the online challenge this past April. “It seems wrong, cutting into something.” With plans to become a medical researcher, she’s excited about the prospect of making kinder, gentler cuts with a virtual blade than with a real scalpel. “The thought of dissection makes me feel kind of queasy,” said Alice Nguyen, 15, a freshman at Rancho Verde High. Rancho Verde has received the software and will begin using it by the end of the year after phasing out its preserved specimen kits. Kriger, an ecologist and founder of Save the Frogs!, an amphibian conservation nonprofit group based in Santa Cruz. Therefore, the goal is to get every middle and high school in the United States to abandon their frog dissection programs by 2014, said Dr. Raising or nabbing frogs to cut up in classroom contributes to their rapidly dwindling populations worldwide. They say that millions of frogs are removed from wetland habitats, stuffed into sacks and inhumanely killed by immersion in preservatives. They will donate full Digital Frog 2.5 licenses to the first 25 schools that agree to end all animal dissections, which many educators still value as important anatomy and physiology lessons.Īnimal rights activists oppose the capture, transport, warehousing and killing of animals destined for dissection, claiming it causes unnecessary suffering and death. Two nonprofit groups, Animal Welfare Institute and Save the Frogs!, are sponsoring the “Race to Stop Dissections” contest. Today 14 states - including California - protect a student’s choice to learn about animal anatomy without a pickled critter, knife, chemicals and churning stomach. The growing number of technological alternatives today is making it possible for thousands of students to swap their scalpels and scissors for the click of a computer mouse. Without the actual touching, a computer dissection can’t be as realistic, he allowed, “but it’s not so drastically different that the kids won’t get something out of it.” “It’s arguably not the same as doing it with a real animal,” said Rancho Verde assistant principal Kevin Stipp, who taught science from 1986 to 2000. In exchange for the minimum five-year promise, the school will switch to virtual-dissection programs with free software worth almost $1,000 provided by a partnership of animal-friendly educators. Rancho Verde High School in Moreno Valley is the first and, so far, only school in the country to accept an animal rights group’s challenge to stop dissections, especially frogs.
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