Jean Williams, an environmental writer n Seattle, has a blog post supporting the efforts of Dr. Kerry Kriger, founder of Santa Cruz based Save the Frogs, to get frog dissections out of the classroom and teach students more advanced and enlightened techniques. Frog dissection: Replace archaic practice with digital technique
Willaims and Kriger offer two arguments:
1. use of frogs in the classroom is the cause of the global decline in frogs .
I wonder, is there any truth here? Frogs for dissection are readily available commercially, but I would guess these come from some form of frog farm. May be someone could contact Carolina, the commercial source? As a very quick effort I looked on the web for commercial frog farms, they seem fairly common.
Is “Save the Frogs” is another radical animal rights group. That would be very sad given the real issues with decline in the wild population. Somehow I suspect that a student dissecting a real frog has a lot more empathy for the species than a student playing dissection in a video game.
2. there now is digital technology for replacing real frogs with virtual ones.
The software they refer to is from a company called “Digital Frog” and at $900/school is certianly not free. Along with PETA, they offer a video of a human pathologist, Dr. Nancy Harrison.
“Digital Frog” is an impressive tool.” Dr. Harrison’s presentation of the software (below) is excellent and I would love to have something like this is I were showing med students how to do an autopsy. What I would NOT want, is to replace the autopsy experience with this software, but like previously stated it will be extremely beneficial to autopsy and dissection classes, even Professors for example Gil Hedley, may adopt this software. Science is NOT about “demonstrations” or about guided tours … whether by lecturer or by video .. of facts.
Frog dissection: Replace archaic practice with digital technique – Seattle environmental policy | Examiner.com http://www.examiner.com/environmental-policy-in-seattle/frog-dissection-replace-archaic-practice-with-digital-technique#ixzz1D7M7NxNT