0morrokh

Haven't been on here in a while cause life's been hectic, but after hearing this one I need a little ranting session.

So my brother who's in middle school comes home the other day and says they were doing experiments with goldfish. He told me they had them in little cups and even he, who is not at all interested in animals, knew there's something wrong with that. Apparently they were learning how to apply the 'scientific method' by testing the temp's affect on a goldie's breathing. The procedure...count the goldie's breaths per minute, then dump in 2 ice cubes, wait a minute, and count again. My brother said his water temp dropped 5C in one minute!!! The fish's breathing rate went down by like 50%...well no wonder, he's being frozen! He also told me his teacher said it's ok to change the temp cause they're cold blooded so they don't care about the temp-after all, they can live outside in ponds in the winter. What a bunch of uhhhh 'Baloney Sandwich'...being cold blooded it obviously follows that they're more sensitive to ambient temp, and the temp drop outside occurs over months and the fish's metabolism can drop slowly. Suddenly dropping the temp by that much sends the fish into shock, not to mention the stress of being confined to a cup and poked at by kids and being in a noisy classroom all day. My brother also said there were about 30 goldfish total for the class, he doesn't know where they got them or what they're going to do with them, and that they sat in the cups for 2 days (since the class is every other day, half the students one day half the next).

What an excellent thing to teach young impressionable kids. I mean, teaching them the all important concept of how to write a hypothesis certainly warrants risking the lives of and inhumanely treating 30 fish. And anyway everyone knows that it's ok to keep goldies in cups and that they don't feel the temp since they're cold blooded.

(And we wonder why the academia in this country is so corrupt....)


--rant over--

Drea

Unbelievable. I can't seem to put more words together on this. I would have a field day with that "teacher" if my child were in that class!

0morrokh

Yeah I told my brother to tell the teacher I'd send PETA after them.

In all seriousness though I'm really mad...they're lucky I don't go to that school any more....

Sabi

What can i say... Its been done all over and worse too. Mad ppl, dunno how can they allow such torture.

lalynya

But how much of it is up tp the teacher vs hiow much of it is decided by the school board..The teachers dont pick the ciriculum after all.

HatchetHaven

susitna-flower

I think that is a good reason YOU and your brother should go to the next school board meeting.

Present them with an overview of what the acceptable conditions are for goldfish. You could include other typical torture of fish as we have been discussing lately, dying and tattooing .
Let them know that the experiment is flawed by keeping the fish in small cups because by the second day most of the available oxygen is out of the cup, and that the ammonia, nitrite and nitrate levels have risen, and that the fish are completely stressed by these conditions. That in fact the immune system of these fish treated so carelessly are being surpressed and in all likely hood in this stressed condition all of the fish will probably die.

As the teacher pointed out they are doing it on cold blooded fish, not a cute cuddly kitten or puppy, which would at least have a fighting chance to maintain life sustaining heat! GRRRrrrrr

COBettaCouple

Yea, it's so hard to see why our 'educational' system is an international joke.

OzzyFan

One solution is to avoid animal experimentation where a visual demonstration isn't necessary to convey the point. If the teacher knows that the breathing will slow down when the temperature drops, why conduct another experiment? Experiments are SUPPOSED to be done when you're trying to figure something out, or perhaps verify a theory; not when you already KNOW what happens...at least when there's an ethical issue with that experiment. *Insert concentration camp reference here*.

Oil_Fan

This is unbelievable. What kind of person would do this without wondering what might happen to the fish? How about we put her in a tub of water and start dropping buckets of ice in and see what happens??!!!!

SereneReyn

she could have done something like show an excerpt from a movie (with permission slips, ofcourse) like The Guardian where Kevin Costner's character explains what the cold is doing to them as they sit in a tub of ice water.

angelfish220

I have a love hate relationship with biology. I love learning biochem and all that jazz, but the live experiments make me sick, We are going to dissect baby pigs in a few weeks. BABY PIGLETS!!! And the school district is like 'this is fine because they aren't living they're just fetuses blah blah blah....' They are INNOCENT!!! they DIDNT have a CHANCE to LIVE!!! they were KILLED!!! the kid who sits behind me stabs the goldfish in the aquarium ( 6 goldfish in a 20 gal dont get me started!!) with bent paper clips! PAPER CLIPS! the teacher thinks its funny and laughs. he LAUGHS AT TORTURE!! how can people be like that? sorry your just found one of my major pet peeves!

MissMTS

My parents are both teachers and as far as I know, the school board decides on the material that has to be covered in class and the areas of that subject that need to be studied in each grade. I believe that the teachers get to pick their own lesson plans. There are much more humane ways to demonstrate and learn about the scientific method. Experimenting on dead animals that have been killed for research purposes is bad enough, but experimenting on a live animal is absolutely disgusting!

0morrokh

Yeah I feel exactly the same way. I love biology (in fact I plan on becomming some sort of biologist) but I hate all the big-wig biologists who think they can justify anything "for the sake of science."

Agreed. This year in bio we did genetics experiments with fruit flies...ended up killing all of them (by freezing them!) so we could count the F2 phenotypes. As much as I love genetics and breeding I think it's horrible to kill all those flies. And the sad part was that I could have predicted all of the results before any of the F2's hatched. I was all very basic stuff we were "testing". I am all for labs and hands on stuff but NOT when they involve killing or mistreating animals, "even" if they're "only" flies or goldfish.

There I go ranting again.

COBettaCouple

I see the message as "life is cheap - abuse it, trash it, dispose of it". That's what they're teaching in science class.

MissMTS

I completely agree. It's awful isn't it!!!!!!!!!!!

HatchetHaven

OzzyFan

The other side of the coin is this: How are we going to know what products are safe for human contact/ingestion (or pet care) if we don't test them on something?

People need to draw the line between 'necessary use of animals for scientific purposes' and 'kids who are compensating for some other losing battle by exerting power over something that can't punish them -- i.e., goldfish'. If kids are torturing animals, there's probably an environmental situation in their lives that requires them to displace their feelings...perhaps they're being bullied at school, beaten at home, verbally abused routinely, given no power...whatever it is, they're at a mental or physical disadvantage against their opponent, and that kind of thing needs to be investigated...even if the initial reason is because you want to protect the goldfish.