A school has refused to punish student or staff, despite pressure from animal rights activist, after a shocking video emerged showing students skipping rope with a cat’s intestines.
The video shows an exercise taking place in an anatomy class at Winston Churchill High School, San Antonio, Texas, earlier this month and shows students dissecting animals, while someone is seen jumping rope with intestines.
Meanwhile another video, which was recorded on Snapchat, shows two students swinging the intestines and a third classmate jumping over it, The Washington Post reports.
A school district spokeswoman, Aubrey Chancellor, told The Washington Post in a statement:
This was not meant to be disrespectful or degrading…In fact, the students and the teacher are very upset it’s being portrayed that way.
The district is still investigating the incident but does not plan to punish the teacher or the students who were involved because it was part of a lesson plan — and because, Chancellor told CBS affiliate KENS, they had no ill will.
Chancellor went on to claim that the teacher had apparently learnt the same lesson back in college and believed it’d be an effective way to teach her students.
She explained that the idea of the lesson was to demonstrate the tensile strength of the organ and although they understand that ‘best practices change over time’, they think this was an effective way to teach the concept.
The classroom footage has offended the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), who are using the footage to highlight the controversy surrounding classroom dissections.
In a statement they claimed:
Every year, over 10 million animals are killed for classroom dissection — they don’t die from natural causes. They’re stolen from the wild, taken from animal shelters, or killed in slaughterhouses.
Dissection is bad science: 98 percent of medical schools don’t require it, studies show that students are less interested in science after being forced to dissect, and it’s a super-archaic, cruel way to teach biology and anatomy.
PETA have suggested that the school use alternative methods to classroom dissection, such as computer games, to teach anatomy.
The school district’s sticking to its guns though saying that dissection will continue to be used as part of the curriculum.
More of a concept than a journalist, Tom Percival was forged in the bowels of Salford University from which he emerged grasping a Masters in journalism.
Since then his rise has been described by himself as ‘meteoric’ rising to the esteemed rank of Social Editor at UNILAD as well as working at the BBC, Manchester Evening News, and ITV.
He credits his success to three core techniques, name repetition, personality mirroring, and never breaking off a handshake.