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Many of our readers must already be either teaching or learning about environmental issues. We invite all, teachers and students, to share with us and other readers about any innovative environmental education activity that you are involved in, in or outside school. Or do you know anybody else who is doing similar work? We would be glad to write about it in these pages so that more and more students and teachers are inspired to create awareness leading to appropriate action and change.

DO you like leaping frogs and crawling rats? Some of you may have caught frogs or climbed over the fan on seeing a mouse crawl by. Take a peek next time you pass the senior biology lab in school. Are there knife-wielding students in lab coats, pretending to be surgeons, studying a tray which has a mouse or a frog with its skin held back by pins?

Andreas Vesalius, a Flemish surgeon, started dissection in the 16th century. He believed that this was the only way to study the complexities of the human body.

Today, the situation is different. Countries like Argentina, USA and Great Britain have either phased it out, or made it optional in schools. In India, the governments of Rajasthan and Gujarat have banned dissection of frogs and rats due to pressure from animal rights groups. Says an activist from Mahajanama, an animal rights group — "When children use harsh methods of learning, knowing that they are legal, it most certainly moulds their minds negatively".

KARE, (Kindness to Animals and Respect to Environment), a Delhi-based animal rights group, challenged dissection in the high court, on the grounds of the suffering it caused the animals. So the court made dissection optional in Delhi for students of classes XI and XII. You can now dissect a flower instead of a mouse, or a frog, to pass the biology practical. KARE also says that according to case studies done by psychologist Dr. Aruna Baroota, students have fainted, vomited or lost their appetites for days, when asked to dissect animals. Dr. Baroota says dissection should be banned as it develops a feeling of disrespect for life which spreads to other species as well. The activist groups have also used the existing laws and the Indian Constitution that have provisions to prevent suffering and cruelty to animals.

Some school teachers feel otherwise. They say think there is no alternative to it. Computer programmes, films, 3-D models and charts cannot provide the same learning and skills which actual dissection gives. Says a teacher "A ‘mouse’ is not the best way to cut a mouse". The computers and associated software are very expensive, and doing dissection on them is like playing a video game. One never gets to see or feel how a living being eats, breathes or reproduces.

Zoologists view dissection as a vital tool to learning about

various physiological systems of animals. Some of you will become surgeons tomorrow. Dissection helps to overcome the initial fear and repulsion which one might have while operating on a human being.

Zoologists, however do agree that animals to be dissected should be properly anaesthised and carefully chosen (sometimes pregnant mice are dissected) to minimise the suffering, and carried out in fewer numbers. KARE counters this by saying that only a fraction of the students who pass out from schools end up becoming doctors or zoologists. Dissection learnt in school is of little use for a medical or zoology degree.