Anatomy lesson

How a college sophomore fought a cat dissection lab requirement -- and got an 'A' in the course

by Michael Gollust

Jeannine Tucker didn't have time to read the description of her human anatomy course before she enrolled for the spring semester of 1997. She didn't need to. The course is a requirement for Tucker, a candidate for an associate degree in cardio-respiratory therapy at the Community College of Rhode Island. The course is also required for most associate degrees in CCRI's allied health programs, a field that includes nursing, physical therapy, and dental hygiene.

But when Tucker showed up for the first day of class, her instructor opened discussion by telling students about their mandatory cat dissection lab. "Right there, I knew I was in for something," Tucker recalls. A self-described "cat fan" and animal-rights advocate of 10 years, Tucker immediately set out to find an alternate way to complete the course requirement.

Her semester wasn't easy. She struggled with a school administration that she felt was unsympathetic to her personal beliefs and her academic goals. And she took it upon herself to complete the course's requirements without spending a moment in dissection lab.

But despite the obstacles, when Tucker was through, she had excelled in her course and had joined the ranks of students across the nation who'd stood up for what they believed in and what they refused to do. More important, she had lent her support to the passage of a new Rhode Island law that gives students the freedom to choose not to dissect.

Jeannine Tucker, 26, lives in Charlestown with her husband and two children. She grew up in Charlestown and attended Chariho Regional High School. Having lived for several years in North Kingstown, she is now in the final stages of her move back to Charlestown and has taken the semester off from school. She plans to return to CCRI in January.

Like many students at the two-year community college, Tucker balances family life and work with her education, attending most of her classes at night while her husband is home to care for their children. She also works on a per-diem basis through a home-care agency as a nursing assistant.

In addition to these duties, Tucker devotes a good deal of her time to animal-rights advocacy. With her friend Mary Grossman, Tucker visits animal shelters and tries to find homes for cats that would otherwise be put to sleep. She has the cats spayed and neutered at a discount from her local veterinarian, and then places ads for the animals in local newspapers. She presently has 15 cats in her home.

Finding help

With only days before the first dissection lab in her anatomy class last spring, Tucker called People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the animal-rights organization of which she has been a member for five years. Looking for advice on how to abstain from the classroom exercise, she was put in touch with Sue Gaines in PETA's education department.

Gaines advised Tucker to frame her opposition to dissection in religious and moral terms. Bobbi Hoffman, PETA's education manager, explains. "When the student frames it as a sincerely held religious belief," she says, "the objection can hold up better in court."

Gaines then told Tucker to talk to her instructor about arranging an alternate way to fulfill the course requirement. And, fortified with advice and support from PETA and from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and the Humane Society of the United States, Tucker took her case to CCRI.

According to Tucker, members of the faculty were not very sympathetic. They told her that there would be no way around her dissection requirement and that if she chose not to participate in the activity, she would fail the course. Dr. Richard Pendola, chairperson of CCRI's biology department, even suggested that Tucker transfer to Bristol Community College to fulfill her anatomy requirement.

"I wasn't saying that we didn't want Jeannine here," says Pendola, "just that I know they use more models in their anatomy courses at that school."

Tucker, however, had already paid her registration fee at CCRI, she says, "so I wasn't going to change schools in the middle of the semester."

Instead, she wrote a letter to Pendola that explained her reasons for choosing not to participate, and the department eventually held a meeting to discuss her case. "I took Jeannine's plan to the anatomy teachers to see what they thought about it," says Pendola.

As it turns out, the faculty ended up excusing Tucker from the dissection exercise on the basis of her religious belief and allowed her to use alternative materials instead. Only problem was that Tucker did not receive verbal approval of her abstention until a few days before her first lab practical, scheduled for February 20. Even worse, the faculty members had stipulated that they would not provide her with extra help or guidance or access to alternative learning materials to help her prepare.

"As long as Jeannine was willing to follow a lesson plan that was equivalent to that of the other students, we would accommodate her," says Pendola. "But we didn't want to have to take her aside and give her one-on-one tutoring. And we just don't have alternative materials to offer our students." In other words, if Tucker wanted to complete the course using alternatives to dissection, she would have to find them on her own.

Luckily for Tucker, Sue Gaines at PETA had referred her to a number of loan programs that allowed Tucker to borrow materials for free. From the Boston-based Ethical Science Education Coalition, she obtained an eight-part Cat Anatomy Video Tape Series, a cat anatomy 35mm slide set, and the Atlas of Cat Anatomy, all produced by Boreal Laboratories, a company that also supplies dissection materials to schools. Tucker also used a laboratory manual she'd purchased from CCRI as a supplement to her high-tech study aides.

But despite all her preparation, when Tucker attended her first lab practical and tried to identify the cat's body parts, she was dismayed to find that the specimen differed greatly from her color-coded illustrations. "The cat was mangled and totally different from the diagrams I had studied," she says. "The students in the class weren't surgeons. How were they supposed to know what they were doing?" Nonetheless, Tucker persisted and startled her instructor by receiving an "A" on her first practical.

Overall, Tucker says, she can't understand why cat dissection is used in the first place. "This was a human anatomy class," she says. "I never understood why we had to learn all the cat anatomy."

Others, however, see definite merits in the practice. "There are so many similarities between cat and human anatomy -- the bones, muscles, and vessels closely resemble those of humans," says Sharon Lee, adjunct anatomy instructor at CCRI. "The cat provides a really nice model and a good way to demonstrate function and structure."

Pendola also defends the use of cat specimens in the course. "We might like to use human cadavers," he says, "but the high cost, low availability, and particular storage and refrigeration requirements of cadavers make that almost impossible for us."

Dissection dissenters unite

Persevering until the end of the semester, Tucker wound up receiving a final grade of "A" for the course and scored the second-highest overall grade in the class without having participated in any of the dissection labs. Naturally, her story became an inspiration for others.

"A lot of the other students came up to me and asked me about my books and videos," says Tucker. "And I would say that at least 10 people told me they would have done what I did if they'd known the alternatives were out there." To those people, she says, "They are out there, and there are people out there who want to help."

Indeed, Tucker's story is not new, and the people who helped her have been fighting for the rights of lab animals for years. As a student, Tucker joins a long list of dissection dissenters going back to 1987 and Jenifer Graham, whose refusal to dissect a frog in junior high school helped bring about California's vanguard student choice law.

Tucker's story is not even new to CCRI. In June 1989, 31-year-old nursing student Roseann Charron contested the same cat dissection requirement as Tucker's, and Charron framed her objection in much the same way that Tucker did, arguing that raising cats for dissection violates the Ten Commandments.

Charron and CCRI officials resolved their dispute in August 1990. They decided to give Charron credit for taking an anatomy class at the University of Rhode Island in which students watched a human dissection instead. (At the time, Charron had no objection to the human dissection, she says, because the subjects had willingly donated their bodies to science while their feline counterparts had not.)

In the final settlement of Charron's case, CCRI declared that similar cases would thereafter be handled on a case-by-case basis. Pendola says that the school still stands by this approach, but a new law could force primary and secondary schools in Rhode Island to proactively accommodate students in similar dissection dilemmas.

At the same time that Tucker was battling at CCRI, state Senator Rhoda Perry (D-Providence) was waging her own war in the Rhode Island General Assembly. And last February, Perry, a self-described "animal guru of the Senate," introduced her animal-dissection student choice bill, S377.

The bill had originated seven years ago in the hands of then-state senator Myrth York, who, along with co-sponsor Perry, had been inspired by a 12-year-old student in York's district who had sought to have dissection removed from her middle school. To the General Assembly, the young girl presented the merits of computer programs, plastic models, and other modern alternatives, and Perry recalls how she "suddenly found myself concerned that the kids in middle and high school were being forced to do dissections."

Perry, a biology major in college, says she can appreciate the value of dissection in some instances, "but these were students who wanted to go on to be poets and French teachers, not doctors. And they were being faced with lowered or failing grades if they didn't do the dissection."

Still, as Perry introduced and reintroduced her bill over the years, objections came from legislators wary of interfering in state school curricula -- and of kids abusing their right to abstain from dissection. To address such concerns, new language was added that required students to get their parents' permission to opt out of dissection exercises, and the bill finally went into effect on July 8, 1997.

The law stipulates that a school must allow a student who doesn't want to dissect to demonstrate competency by using alternate materials, and that a teacher cannot discriminate against or lower a student's grade for not participating in a dissection. The law applies to both public and private, and primary and secondary schools across the state.

With the passage of the law, Rhode Island joins California, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, and Maryland as the 7th state in the nation to allow students to abstain from classroom dissection. Laws are currently pending in Illinois and Massachusetts.

Not a black-and-white debate

By the time the law went into effect in Rhode Island, Jeannine Tucker was out of class and preparing for her move. But as the bill was being debated in the spring, Rhode Island Animal Rights Coalition (RIARC) member Kathleen Benoit and PETA staffers had begun to mobilize concerned Rhode Islanders to call their representatives and to volunteer to testify in support of the bill. Benoit called Tucker, and on May 21, two weeks after her final exam, Tucker testified before the House Committee on Health, Education, and Welfare.

Tucker presented her story to the committee and argued that "students who are forced to dissect animals develop a lack of respect for all life, which can ultimately result in a poor bedside manner or worse." She stated, "Biology is defined as the study of life, and dissection is its complete opposite, the practice of death."

Tucker praised the bill as "giving students a chance to express their moral and ethical beliefs as compassionate human beings," and she affirmed that "students have the right to a cruelty-free education."

Although Tucker may not have single-handedly convinced lawmakers to pass the bill, her efforts did not go unnoticed. Senator Daniel Issa (D-Central Falls) had been a longtime opponent of the bill before changing his mind and joining Perry in co-sponsorship this year. What helped sway him, he says, was hearing testimony such as Tucker's.

"The quality of the witnesses who testify in support of a bill has a lot to do with a legislator's feeling," says Issa. "If you see strong persuasive arguments, it definitely affects the outcome."

Today, Tucker looks like a heroine, and in many ways she is: she stuck to her beliefs and earned an "A" by studying on her own. As for the state law, it looks like a no-brainer: it grants students the choice to abstain from dissection.

But in the debate over animal dissection, the issues are not so clear-cut. And if there are any villains, it's hard to find them. Although the arguments of animal-rights supporters are compelling, it's hard to find fault with the arguments espoused by educators and health professionals who feel that dissection is a valuable learning tool.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals argues that 5.7 million animals are used in secondary- and college-level science classes every year for the purposes of dissection. On its Website, the group says that "classroom dissection desensitizes students to the sanctity of life and can encourage students to harm animals elsewhere, perhaps in their own backyard."

Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, PETA mentions, attributed his fascination with murder and mutilation to a 9th-grade dissection of a fetal pig. Bobbi Hoffman of PETA asserts that "every study shows that students learn more from alternatives than from actual samples."

Educators, on the other hand, emphasize the pedagogical merits of dissection. Sharon Lee, who is both an instructor at CCRI and the science chair at Exeter West Greenwich Regional High School, says, "There's a big difference conceptually between the simulations and the real thing. Using a real animal specimen enables students to experience visually how things are attached and to see the relationship of things in space."

Still, Lee is not resistant to new ideas, she says. "I agree with the notion that it's important for people in the education and science fields to learn to be more sensitive to the issue. I know that CCRI and other colleges and high schools have taken a close look at labs and how to cut down on the dissection that goes on there. If they see a way that an alternative can be used, I think it's a good thing. But if there is no adequate alternative, they should go with the specimen."

Why completely overhaul the system, after all, when one significant fact remains: despite the presence of a lively debate, cases of student protest are infrequent. Bobbi Hoffman of PETA says that what happened with Jeannine Tucker "happens every day someplace in the country, but only a few select students, like Jeannine, take it all the way."

But in Rhode Island, at least, the cases seem to be few and far between. In his 15 years at CCRI, Pendola recalls just two students who objected to dissection: Roseann Charron and Jeannine Tucker. Lee has been an instructor at CCRI for five years and reports that she "has never had a student ever even mention that they didn't want to dissect."

And even when they do encounter such a protest, teachers say that many high schools already have policies in place to accommodate dissenting students. "We provide computer programs to students who don't want to dissect to simulate the experience," says Joseph Dufort, head of the science department at Classical High School in Providence. "If the alternatives help students make it through the course and get something out of the class, we let them use them."

As for the new student choice law, Dufort says, "The frequency of kids choosing not to dissect is so low, and with schools already offering alternatives, there really is no problem."

Still, Lee affirms that the law has real value to educators. "I like this law because I think it's important for a law to focus and direct us, to remind us to be more sensitive, and to help us be a little more careful about what we are doing."

And, of course, the law has real value for students. "It's important that students have the choice that this law provides," Tucker says. "If you don't want to cut up something dead, you shouldn't have to."

The pace of change

Progress in the arena of animal dissection is slow. Rhode Island's student choice law was seven years in the making. And after the experiences of Roseann Charron and Jeannine Tucker, CCRI still has no policy to provide alternatives to dissection.

It seems that patience and persistence -- such as Rhoda Perry's and Jeannine Tucker's -- are the best weapons in the slow battle to open up institutions to dissection alternatives and that crucial transformations of mind and conscience often occur away from the clamor of the Internet and the media, and within the more quiet and mundane spaces of everyday life. Like among Jeannine's lab mates in anatomy class, or in Senator Issa's home.

Before he joined Perry as a co-sponsor of her bill, Issa originally had opposed it. "I spoke against it on the floor. I voted against it at least twice," he says. "I felt that it was wrong to stick our noses in the classroom."

But Issa's daughter, who was 12 at the time the bill was being debated, convinced him of the bill's importance. "To see the strength of conviction in the eyes of a child who really knew she didn't want to dissect an animal, that really did it for me," he says. "When a thing like this hits home, when it happens in the home, it can make you change your mind."

These days, Tucker is continuing her work to promote alternatives to dissection. "I'm trying to get the word out about the new law to schools all over Rhode Island. I want to let people know that the bill is for real," she says.

Tucker is also drafting a policy to offer to CCRI on how to accommodate students who object to dissection. "I just hope," she says, "that after my experience, maybe the next person won't have to go through all that I went through."