Mee-Oww!

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Written by Jeannie Causey, Editor-In-Chief

“I love the smell of death in the morning,” science teacher Mr. Spann said.

While slicing open the cat’s stomach skin from the bottom chin to the tail, students all over Mr. Spann’s class groaned while liquid oozed out. In second block Anatomy/physiology, students were required to dissect cats as part of their lab grade for the new semester.

“First we had to wash the whole cat down, then make the first incision from chin to tail, then you had to peal back the skin all the way to the back to get a full view of it’s muscles,” junior Olivia Maynard said.

There were a total of eight cats in that class, and each group was required to analyze the muscles of the cat. 

“My group accidentally cut a whole in our cat’s stomach before we were supposed to, so we tried to stitch it back together but it didn’t go very well,” Maynard said.

According to Pawprints and Purrs, Inc. over 100,000 cats are dissected annually in America unlike European countries who either outlaw dissection below the university level or don’t allow it at all. 

“Cat’s aren’t killed for Anatomy,” Mr. Spann said. “Shelters kill when no one wants the strays and and then they are taken by biological supply companies after being euthanized.”

This experiment is meant to enable students to study the human body systems through the cat’s; because we are both mammals all of our organ systems are quite similar. The reasoning behind dissecting cats instead of another animal are that they are mid-sized, and are easily available and uniform in size.

“We need something that was big enough to see the muscle system,” Mr. Spann said. “It is beneficial because it allows us to learn about all the different organ systems without dissecting humans.”

Overall, the experiment was a success and a lot of students felt that they gained an understanding of our own organ systems in the end.

“I was really excited to learn about the anatomy of a cat because it is so similar to ours,” Olivia said. “I think that I have a much better understanding of how we work now.”