Disecting cats in Biology class.

[Barbara]

I know that disecting animals is part of your school life- I would never have survived that. Here it is not done at all- only at university when you study biology or medicine. I was happy to learn about anatomy from drawings and hope that will be it for the rest of my life.
I cannot even disect a dead chicken for dinner and am close to fainting when I cut my finger but if I had to face a mammal I would have just died.

[Suki Wingy]

Well, I do. When I die, I want every salvageable organ and tissue to be used to save other people's lives that are dieing if they don't get X organ transplant.

About the cats, if there was a sure-fire way to prove they didn't die just to be dissected then I would be all for it. If the school board made sure somehow that the cats either died of natural causes or were euthenized at a shelter after they would have been anyway then I'd be happy. The average city shelter euthenizes 5-10 healthy cats a day because they just don't have room for them all. If they had to go to die at least their bodies could go to good use.

I don't know if the cats care what happens to them, because no one can ever prove or disprove in life after death, but I believe there is nothing after death, which is why I want my body to go to helping other people live after I am gone.

[pomtzu]

I don't know if the cats care what happens to them, because no one can ever prove or disprove in life after death, but I believe there is nothing after death,

I imagine that statement will evoke numerous opinions here. Maybe somebody should start a new thread on this one, but it won't be me, since I refuse to debate politics or religion on PT! It makes interesting reading tho...........

[Suki Wingy]

It kind of is related to this though. How can the cats care what happens to their bodies if their thoughts cease to exist after they are dead?

Conversely, someone could say the cats' thoughts and souls still live on after their body dies and so they would be upset that their bodies were cut up. I know that people used to believe that their bodies needed to be intact for them to go to heaven so they went to great lengths to make sure they weren't stolen by grave robbers when they died. Same as this current situation has with cats, there was an upswing in people killing healthy people in order to fill the schools' needs for cadavers.