Rabbits, mice, guinea pigs, frogs, parakeets, rats,
snakes, fish, turtles, and countless other animals suffer abuse and neglect
in school classrooms every year as teaching "tools" and classroom "pets."
Many teachers bring animals into the classroom with good intentions--to
interest or amuse students, to teach responsibility, or to convey
information about the animals themselves. But animals suffer because of
those practices. Ironically, students can and do learn responsibility, as
well as animal behavior and hands-on science, without the presence of
animals in their classrooms. There are far more constructive ways to learn
about living beings than by holding animals captive in school, where they
are vulnerable to hazards and neglect.
Paying the Price
Poked with pencils, accidentally dropped, given the
wrong food, ignored, or kept in far too small an enclosure, animals often pay
the price for educators' lack of ingenuity in devising appropriate lessons.
Those who seek to keep animals in schools are hindering
an encouraging cultural trend toward greater sensitivity to animals'
well-being. Opponents of efforts to protect animals overstate the educational
benefits of using animals in the classroom while underestimating the animals'
suffering and the difficulty of protecting them. In defending such practices,
they consistently deny the animals' interests.
Some reports PETA has received of animal abuse in U.S.
schools include:
- Tarantulas, turtles, and lizards died because a high
school science department failed to provide adequate food or maintain proper
temperatures.(1)
- An elementary-school girl, pecked by a chick she was
holding, threw the chick against the wall.(2)
- A guinea pig taken home for winter break suffered a
broken back.(3)
- A parakeet left in a school building over winter
break died when the temperature dropped too low.(4)
- Five rabbits, two goats, a sheep, and a pig were
stabbed or crushed to death despite being kept inside a school's padlocked
barn.(5)
- Thirty-five to 40 gerbils who were kept as classroom
"pets" were intentionally stomped on by children at the end of the school
year.(6)
Many "textbook" uses of animals are intrinsically
inhumane. In chick-hatching programs, popular in elementary schools, teachers
often fail to turn the eggs on schedule, or a custodian unplugs the incubator
thinking it's an appliance inadvertently left running. The result: dead and
crippled hatchlings, as well as distraught children.
One school's science project calls for students to place
fish in warm water, then cold water, to demonstrate the effects of the change
on respiratory rates. One student's parent was told that some of the students
had made the warm water too hot; some of the fish leapt out of the water and
died. When students asked that the project be stopped, the teacher refused.
Some school districts inject male chickens with estrogen
and females with testosterone to show "opposite-sex mating behavior." One
caller reported that a chicken died immediately upon injection. Many chicks
die in shipment for this and other school activities.
Even classroom "pets" can suffer from neglect and abuse.
Once animals are brought to school, important aspects of their nature are
ignored altogether. Mice and most other small mammals are nocturnal, yet they
are kept in brightly lit classrooms and removed from their cages during the
day. Snakes and other nondomestic animals demonstrate "predation" to children
who laugh, scream, or turn away as live mice or rats are fed to the animals.
School's Out - Now What?
When the school year ends, these once-valuable "pets"
suddenly pose a problem: how to dispose of them? All too often, the animals
end up the responsibility of already-overworked shelters or are given to
students who can provide "good homes." Unfortunately, important screening
procedures, such as home checks and interviews with the entire family, are
often inconvenient or overlooked by a hurried and overworked teacher at the
end of the school year. Even if a student has behaved responsibly toward an
animal in a classroom, siblings might be abusive or reckless. Sadly, many
children become bored with animals once they take them home. Water bottles may
be left dry, food dishes empty, and cages dirty. Animals also can be ignored,
or deprived of human contact or appropriate companions of the animals' own
species.
What Lesson Learned?
Keeping animals in the classroom teaches the wrong
lessons about animals. Students might learn personal responsibility from
cleaning a rat's cage or filling a hamster's water bottle on time, but this
kind of basic discipline is easily taught without animals. Rather than
teaching the broader responsibility for animals' total well-being, allowing
animals to be used as "learning tools" inevitably lowers their status in the
minds of students. Young people generalize from the "do's" and "don'ts" of
authority figures, and human beings of all ages can contrive an endless
variety of animal "uses" once they are taught that animals are tools.
Teaching the responsibility involved in caring for
captive animals ignores the question of whether animals belong in cages at
all. Instead, teachers who want their classes to learn about animals can lead
discussions of these ethical issues rather than dictate by their actions that
the position most detrimental to animals is correct.
School hatching projects should be replaced with modern
teaching programs. Films, videos, state-of-the-art computer programs, and
plastic models can demonstrate the major stages of animal development--even of
chicks still inside the egg. Such programs are already in use in other areas
of biology education and can easily be adapted to fit classroom needs.
What You Can Do
A more respectful understanding of animals can be
encouraged by quietly observing animals in their natural surroundings. If your
school is planning a hatching project, urge the science curriculum
coordinator, the classroom teacher, or whomever is responsible to use an
alternative project, such as visiting your local animal shelter or a wildlife
rehabilitation center.
If your school is keeping animals--either as "pets" or
as teaching "tools"--protest to the teacher, the administrator, and, if
necessary, the school board. Ask your school board to forbid the use of
animals in classrooms.
References
- Cantor, David, "Animals Don't Belong in School,"
The American School Board Journal, October 1992, pp. 39-40.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- "School Probes Report That Kids Stomped on Gerbils as
Year Ended," Grand Rapids Press, June 17, 1991.
