Students Seeking to Excise Dissections

The refrain being heard across the Van Nuys High School campus on Tuesday seemed to be “cut it out.”

Student animal-rights activists were demanding that the school stop using frogs, cats and grasshoppers for dissection in science classes.

School officials were asking the activists to quit making an issue out of a traditional, accepted, successful teaching technique.

Science students were awaiting their chance to take on this year’s crop of chemically preserved lab specimens to remove organs and muscle--a traditional end to their classes.

The furor started when 15-year-old Debra Treister learned that her life science class was scheduled to dissect frogs and worms next week. She drafted a petition demanding that Van Nuys High halt such study and circulated it among the almost 1,800 students until she had about 600 signatures.

“I feel it’s useless to dissect animals unless you’re studying to be a vet,” Debra said Tuesday. “It just doesn’t apply to 95% of the kids. It just desensitizes students toward living things.”

Anonymous Communique

Worried about the school’s reaction to the petition, Debra dropped it off anonymously at Principal Jane Godfrey’s office. A note asked Godfrey to respond in the school’s daily bulletin--which is read in classrooms--that she was willing to meet and discuss the demands of Students Against Dissection, or SAD.

Godfrey, who said she spotted numerous phony names on the petition, refused.

Debra countered by calling in reinforcements from a Tarzana animal-rights group involved in last week’s widely publicized protest at UCLA’s animal laboratory.

When a leader and a lawyer for the Last Chance for Animals organization sought to attend a student discussion of dissection Monday, they were turned away at the school gate.

“That’s their private cause out there,” Godfrey said of the activists. “They weren’t parents or guardians. They had no right to come onto the campus.”

Godfrey said the petition will not stop the dissection, which involves frogs, worms and other creatures for most 10th-grade science classes, but uses cats for advanced placement courses taken by college-bound youngsters and 450 students in a science-math magnet program.

“The point that needs to be put over is the students have a right to petition, but so do kids who want to dissect. Everyone shouldn’t have to suffer from their beliefs,” Godfrey said of the activists.

The Los Angeles Unified School District allows students to skip the dissection. But biology teacher Bob Takano said only two of his students in the past 18 years have refused to take the knife in hand, and both of them stayed to watch.

“By looking at structure and observing it in three dimensions, students can understand the relationship between structure and function,” Takano said. “It’s different from looking at a picture in a book.”

Takano said the lab specimens are purchased by the school district from medical-supply houses at costs that range from $22 for a preserved cat to 25 cents for a grasshopper.

“It’s not like a barbecue. You don’t bring your own,” he said.

Gerald J. Garner, secondary-science specialist for the school district, said relatively few high school classes use cats because of the cost. Dissection “is a traditional thing that goes back forever,” he said.

‘What’s the Point?’

Bernard C. Shine, the lawyer for Last Chance for Animals, said the group plans to investigate where the animals come from, how they are killed and how much officials pay for them.

“Never in my life was I aware cats were being dissected by high school kids,” said Shine, an Encino resident. “What’s the point of kids clowning around with body parts? The subtle message is life is meaningless. It’s not a very good object lesson.”

But Van Nuys High science student Adam Grancell said the protesters have missed the point of the science lesson.

“My first thought when I dissected a cat was ‘yuck--I don’t want to touch anything that’s dead,’ ” the 17-year-old said. “But it was useful to me. I’ve decided I want to go into biological research after college. . . .

“We kill beef every day to feed our bodies. Killing the cats are for the mind.”