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No. But I went on to nursing school where it went beyond frogs.
Yes. I did not like anything about dissecting frogs. And I learned very little.
Nursing school was worse. In the 1980s, animals were destroyed by NYC in a chamber that sucks the air out, and this kills the animal.
We had cats. The professor told us that their horrible facial expressions were just "neurological responses".
The cat's faces were in agony. Neurological responses my ass. Those animals died an agonizing death.
I KNEW it at the time. We all did. Five years later, NYC changed it's method of putting animals to sleep.
Interestingly, there was a creepy young woman who really seemed to enjoy dissecting her cat. Her lab partner left, and joined us. She bragged about sadistic practices in animal slaughter, and in general, was disgusting and inappropriate.
A few of us were so upset that we spoke to the professor. We thought he'd blow us off, but instead, hetookit very seriously. He had two labs monitored by a psych professor who held a PhD.
He also spoke to her privately.
When I was in high school biology, I couldn't make the first cut, so my lab partner had to do that. Then I did the rest of the dissection.
A decade later, when I was an earth and general science teacher, I got stuck with one class of biology for "low level" students. When it came time for frog dissection, the principal decided that the "low level" students didn't need to do the frog dissection, so to save money, they would watch a film. My students were furious...after all, it's a highlight of the biology course. Well, there was a small swamp out in back of the school, so a couple of students and I went out after school and caught a dozen toads...the frogs were too fast for us...and just how different could they be. But I couldn't stand the idea of pithing them (sticking a needle in the brain to cause death), so I got a huge bell jar and put the toads in there along with a large piece of cotton soaked in chloroform (this was in the 1970s, and we had it in the chemistry lab). The toads were in their all night, and the next early afternoon when we did the lab I thoroughly rinsed off the toads, the kids pinned the toads to the wax dissecting trays...and about half of the toads weren't dead and became conscious...fortunately before we started dissection. What a nightmare. Another night in the bell jar took care of situation. All because the principal didn't want to waste money buying 12 frogs and they had a geologist teaching biology.
Yep, I did not like it and I stayed home the day we were dissecting a frog. Took a zero on lab for that day. It has yet to affect my adult life so far. If I was to go back in time and do HS biology over, I would skip that day again. lol
I didn't much care for the rubbery animals preserved in formaldehyde - nasty smell! I could do the dissections no problem however until I hit a class in embryology - a required class since my major was biology with an emphasis on the zoological side of things.
We had to kill pregnant mice by placing them in a bell jar along with some gauze soaked in chloroform. Those poor mice reacted the same way a human would - they stood on their hind legs and covered their noses with their small paws - broke my heart. We then had to dissect out the embryos from the still warm body of Mama Mouse and mount the tissue on slides for viewing. The prof forced everyone in the class to do this individually - no lab partners made of sterner stuff allowed.
The very next day after that experience, I went down to the biology department office and officially switched my major to botany which was more fun anyhow.
In high school, I avoided Biology because I did not want to dissect anything, nor was I interested in sketching plant parts. But, I majored in Biology as a college undergraduate--developed an interest in genetics.
As an undergraduate, we had to dissect a fetal pig, an earthworm and a sheep's brain. We did some kind of experiment involving frog legs and electrical impulses and an experiment which (if I remember correctly) involved dripping dopamine onto a mouse's brain. I hated it all. Has a lot to do with why graduate education was in microbiology. Bacteria do not have nervous systems. (Although, they can move towards food and away from toxins.) Lots of tools available for studying gene regulation in bacteria.
First few times with human cadavers were a bit odd, but got normal after you'd been digging around. Just freshman anatomy, so we weren't doing any real dissecting but just poking around at stuff.
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