Keeping the “Life” in “Life Sciences”
Modern, non-animal teaching methods are more effective, less expensive, and more humane than traditional animal dissection. It’s time to make humane education the norm.
Helping Teachers Make the Humane Choice
NAVS strongly believes that students and teachers should be able to choose a humane dissection alternative, and we have long touted the advantages of working with humane dissection tools as alternatives to “traditional” dissection.
BioLEAP.org provides resources to teachers who want to create a more humane, inclusive, and compassionate classroom experience for their students.
The humane solutions catalog features effective non-animal alternatives to help teach students valuable skills while they learn about anatomy and physiology. From web-based programs and apps to physical models, teachers can find engaging solutions that meet their instructional needs at many price points.
The BioLEAP Classroom Grant offers awards of up to $1,000 to teachers in the United States who want to implement humane methods in their classrooms.
NAVS has compiled “action packets” for teachers and administrators that outlines the advantages of using humane alternatives and key talking points to share with colleagues, parents, students, and other important audiences.
NAVS has compiled “action packets” for teachers and administrators that outlines the advantages of using humane alternatives and key talking points to share with colleagues, parents, students, and other important audiences.
Advocating for Student Choice
No animal should be made to suffer for a student to obtain a good education.
Likewise, no student should be asked to be responsible for an animal’s suffering as part of that education. Yet the dissection of once-live animals remains the “gold standard” in biology classrooms across the United States.
Through our Compassionate Humane Options in Classroom Education (CHOICE) initiative, NAVS encourages legislators in states lacking student choice measures to consider introducing legislation that would allow students to choose a humane dissection tool.
Currently, 21 states and Washington, DC, have laws on the books that allow students to do just that.
Fighting for New Standards
The goal of replacing classroom dissection with superior humane scientific methods for all students and teachers can only be achieved if the key players in this field are persuaded that doing so is the best course of action.
We are fighting a mindset—and until that mindset changes, true progress will continue to be stymied.
Key drivers in the perpetuation of this line of thinking are the country’s educational leadership organizations. Standards published by the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) and the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) promote to their members the notion of dissection as an effective and valuable part of biology education.
In fact, a recent update to the NABT’s position statement on the “Use of Animals in Biology Education” even goes so far as to claim that the use of alternatives in place of dissection “may constitute a disservice to many students and does not acknowledge the well-documented educational benefits of hands-on dissection.”
To fight this mindset, NAVS has been working closely with educators and experts in the field of biology and related areas to demonstrate the value of non-animal dissection models. We recently contributed to a meta-analysis comparing student learning outcomes for anatomy labs conducted using specimen dissection and non-animal methods. The paper’s findings show that students who completed humane labs using non-animal models performed as well as or better than their peers who did specimen dissections, disproving claims by the NABT and NSTA that animal dissection is the gold standard in anatomy education.
Changing long-held beliefs and replacing classroom dissection is not a challenge that will be overcome quickly. However, we believe that it can happen—and that it will.