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In college, I had to dissect a cat. I was horrified and couldn't do it, so my lab partner kindly did it for me. I've been grateful to her for that ever since. After lab, I went home and couldn't look my own cat in the eye.
In grade school, I had to dissect a tapeworm. Mom made spaghetti for dinner that night and I refused to eat it, picturing a tapeworm covered in spaghetti sauce.
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I LOVED the frog dissection, and learned a very valuable lesson. The insides of frogs don't look alike. Their organs look different - some organs bigger than other individual frog's organs, some in slightly different places. It's the system that works, and they are all approximations on the mean, none are the standard by which all are measured. Also, my frog had a tiny baby horny toad in its belly, belying the story we were told that they were lab raised and not live caught. ;D
The next step we moved on to was fetal pigs, and there was a metal trash can lined with black plastic in which fetal pigs sat stewing in formaldehyde. This was shortly after abortion was legalized and we were all very attuned to how human fetuses appeared, and these things look so very similar. Also the images of human fetuses in garbage cans was jarringly similar.
The garbage can with the pig fetuses was gone the next day, and was never spoken of again. Because, nope. Too soon.
No, it was more a problem with smell of formaldehyde. Dissecting frogs was harmless but made me wonder about the old saying that frog legs taste like chicken.
We were lucky as a science classmate family had a farm and we also got a few 'portions' of other animals to investigate scientifically. A sheep's head is one I remember but the instructor did most of the work of course to illustrate various components. I recall examining the gelatinous eyeballs of a cow in a separate container.
There is an aspect of psychology involved in compartmentalizing and disassociating the critters from any pets i.e the cat dissection. Although I do recall going to our historic market as a youth and upon seeing the skinned rabbits noting how they anatomically look very similar to cats without fur!
We had a running gag growing up whenever some dinner time meal was seemingly 'sketchy' to recite the line from classic Warner Brothers Bugs Bunny cartoon, - when Bugs mistakenly takes the abandoned Hoboken Penguin all the way to the south pole and along the way in the train box car they encounter the hungry hobo who states emphatically after gazing upon the penguin that "Pengoo-ins is practically chickenz"
Aside from the chemical smells of the creatures we were dissecting, i found dissections to be fascinating. Then again, I was a kid who loved to watch reruns of "Quincy: ME."
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