I took an anatomy/physiology class as a senior in high school, and we learned on a cat. It was such an experience. Not everyone in our class was thinking of going into medicine as a career, I think the reason we enrolled in this class was because we were eager to learn about how a body works. I've always been an animal lover, but knowing that these cats weren't "killed" just for us to learn on made it easier to distance myself emotionally. I can't remember what we named our cat...but we worked on it for an entire semester. I aced the class, learned a lot...retained the information that I learned from that class until 2 years later when I took the anatomy class in College.