PLEASE read!: Early Teaching aids

I suppose this shouldn't be under the Universities sub-forum.. but I looked for another veterinary exclusive subforum for a whole 15 minutes and came up with nothing, so .... apologies.
I have a somewhat vague and elaborate question but please, PLEASE read to the end because i'm quite disturbed by this.
I'm a first year student at the Bombay Veterinary College. Being in India, a livestock dependent country, our coursework focuses on cattle with comparisons to horses, dog and fowl. To study myology in the first semester, they slaughter 2 cows, separate the head and limbs from the torso and preserve it in formalin. Our job is to skin the specimen, peel the fascia and memorize the positions of the superficial muscles of the face and limbs.
Come exatime, they bring out the limbs, prop them on a table and ask us to identify certain muscles.
Is it just me, or is this a horribly ineffecient and savage method of learning myology? The formalin preserved muscles are hardly reminiscent of living flesh and I will assume that skinning carcasses is not a skill that practicing veterinarians require. Wouldn't it be easier to use model as a teaching aid at this early stage?Obviously, dissection is required at some point, but how is it done at your university before you reach a stage where you actually know about the meat you're digging around in?

Lastly, please let me know if i didn't make enough sense... i'm having trouble getting my thoughts across and I'll try again later. :confused:

Thankyou to any brave soldiers who read to this point. If there is a better sub-forum for this topic, point me to it por favor.

Reply 1

blondey

i am not yet a vet student, but it is my belief that all the vet schools here include dissection in their course - yes it may have sum ethical debate around it, but i personally believe that you cant truely learn anatomy properly without it. looking at photographs and diagrams in a book is completely different to when ur faced with the real thing infront of you! its not just about learning the structure, its about learning how things feel etc - which no doubt will help prepare you for surgery, without practicing on a live animal (causing undue harm probably!)

your right it does seem slightly unethical, but overall i think maybe a few sacrafices need to be made, so that students can learn to improve lives for thousands of future animals - and after all the animal cant feel it once its dead.

these are however just my opinions, you have the right to dissagree

Reply 2

ungoogleable

You misunderstand. I did mention that dissection is obviously an essential part of the coursework. My question was - is it necessary at a stage where the student isn't educated enough to understand the big picture? A cut up formalin-soaked limb has barely discernable features and does not show the origins or insertions of a muscle. They also do not have the same feel of an animal being operated on.
To me, it just seems like an exercise in futility until the student has some book knowledge.

Reply 3

ungoogleable

I'll try to rephrase: At what point during your veterinary course was the first mammal dissection carried out, and what was taught from it?

Reply 4

tessa

yeah i found first year dissections (on formulin specimens) looking at muscles completely boring and useless...i think ucan barely even tell the diff muscle groups on the legs...but our vetschool was just like so u can practise dissections and cutting up stuff etc....the second year dissections have been much better..i think it was more of a mix of fresh and not but with organs etc even in formulin u can discern stuff more clearly and actually poke around at stuff (except the brain which looks practically totally the same to me...lol) so yeh in sort of answer 2 ur q.....i found limb dissections in 1st year completely useless (but not the heart and lung ones we also did in first year)

Reply 5

Yeti-Boy

For our anatomy course, (first year pre-medicine liberal arts college), we went to the 'bodies' exhibit (exposition of dead dissected Chinese bodies). Which was useful for a better understanding of the anatomy, but I think you still learn more from it when you dissect body parts yourself. At high school we used pig hearts and cow eyes to learn the anatomy, which the school got from abattoirs. But killing animals for the sole purpose of learning its anatomy is in my opinion unethical.

Reply 6

Yeti-Boy

Why would the RSPCA incinerate living perfectly healthy animals?... The point is that I'd like to become a vet with the purpose of saving the lives of animals, and killing the same animals that you would like to save later on, is a bit ironic... I think that there are enough occasions were animals have to be euthanized for medical reasons, and I personally would feel more comfortable if the animal used for dissection had to euthanized / slaughtered anyways, than that it would make a 'sacrifice' for the greater good. I mean the don't provide bodies for medical students by euthanizing humans, so I don't see the need for killing animals for the sole purpose of education, especially since there are a lot of other ways to get the specimen (I imagine)...

Reply 7

xxnikkixx

Yeti-Boy

Why would the RSPCA incinerate living perfectly healthy animals?

Because not all the animals in their care can be given a new home. They get overwellming numbers of animals into their rehoming shelters and the ones that have been ther the longest (6 months in my local shelter) are euthanised to give new arrivals a chance to win someones heart. They dont have enough space to house every animal for long periods of time.

PLEASE read!: Early Teaching aids

Related discussions

Latest

Trending

Trending

Articles for you