I disected a pig in High school...the advanced anatomy class did cats though. I can't really say watching it bothered me (my friends were in the class) and it WAS educational. Being an Information Systems major in college, I obviously don't use the knowledge now lol. To me, those cats came in buckets of foul smelling liquid and were very much dead. Now if I had to KILL the cat first, I'd have a problem. Call me a hypocrite if you must, but I just don't have the disire or want to kill anything for any reason, unless I intend to eat said thing or I'm defending myself. Disection to me isnt killing the animal, it was dead long before my unskilled hands reached it! My husbands high school had a bio teacher that liked to kill monkeys...they would come in live from some wierd lab and the kids would have to gas the monkeys before they disected them...and it wasn't killing gas either, it was just a paralytic...so the monkeys were alive when they were cut up. Now THAT is animal cruelty in my eyes...at least the cats were *hopefully* humanely euthanized....
Oh and that Science teacher was fired eventually....