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.

Blub

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!!!!!!!!!!!

Blub

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.

0morrokh

That's possible in many unfortunate cases but I don't actually think there's usually some psychological 'cause' to kids who mistreat animals...as in, many kids have perfectly good lives but still mistreat animals. I think it's just the environment we grow up in...adults don't respect animals so why should the kids? If the teacher hands them goldies in bowls, then of course kids aren't going to treat the fish with care. They've learned by example that fish don't need to be cared for. I think that's basically the reason fish are so mistreated. There are some people out there who have issues with violence, and others who are mistreated and take out their feelings on helpless animals, but I think most people just don't realize how their actions harm animals. I think empathy is something that is largely learned, and for that reason even perfectly nice kids with perfect family situations end up mistreating fish. For example...if I'm bored outside in the summer I might start picking grass. This obviously harms the grass but I don't care because I know the grass doesn't have feelings...after all I've seen it mowed, trampled, etc all my life. I don't harm the grass for any reason, aside from the fact that I don't have a reason not to. The only way to get me to stop this behavior would be to come out with research saying that grass feels pain and suffers when I pick it, and even then I would be very skeptical because I'd still see the neighbor out mowing the grass every week.

I'm not trying to minimize the problems associated with kids who are mistreated, but I just wanted to share my thoughts on why I think generally kids who mistreat animals do it. I'm not accusing anyone here but I think adults have a tendency to 'label' kids rather than addressing the problem. After all, doing it removes the blame from us to the kid or to a specific circumstance around the kid. The fact is that most adults couldn't care less about a goldfish, so why are we so surprised about kids mistreating fish? Maybe if adults starting caring for fish rather than handing them in cups to kids to experiment on, then the kids would start caring for fish too. But a lot of people find it easier to just say, "they're insecure" or "they have a bad home life" or "they're just being boys" or whatever. This is really one of my biggest pet peeves, especially since being a teenager I get a whole heck load of labels dumped on me, or I see labels being dumped on friends rather than attempts to help solve the situation, and then adults complain when the teens don't improve after being given the proper label.

OzzyFan this was not directed at you at all...the problem you mentioned is very valid and I agree that it's the case in some situations. Your post just sort of got me thinking of other reasons why kids might mistreat animals, since hopefully not all of them are being abused, and I know your post was referring specifically to cases where abuse is taking place...(don't want you to take this post the wrong way.)

Narcicius

I can't believe this, none of my teachers would allow this to happen to animals, when I was learning the experiment process there was no live demonstration, we did it on things like liquids or plants, not animals.

anah_go_karts

should put the school board on ice see if they like being frozen

angelfish220

it is sickening! just plain not right. Omorrokh has a point, if the previous generation would treat animals right our generation would too ( I'm not blaming it on you 'old' people but people like my bio teacher). I hope my children know how to treat animals cause if they dont I might just disown them!

OzzyFan

0morrokh:

I don't see how a kid's mistreatment of an animal could NOT be linked to some mental process. Now, I certainly agree that it's possible for the kid's behavior to be influenced by people around him (and not necessarily symptomatic of a mental illness)...perhaps that was the case with the kid who poked the goldfish in the original example.

I definitely take issue with your claim that "adults don't respect animals so why should the kids?". Unless you meant that "kids who DO mistreat animals had similar parents", I can say that my parents, at least when raising me, never demonstrated a disrespect for animals. I decided to kill a dying neon today because I wanted to remove the disease, as much as I could, from my tank...but I spent about 10 minutes thinking of how to do it, because I felt that smashing it with a hammer would be a little messy, and throwing it out in the snow would cause it to suffocate before freezing, but leaving it in the tank would possibly lead other fish to infection (I ended up putting it in the freezer in a water-filled ziploc bag).

Labelling kids doesn't solve problems (although it COULD, if that awareness makes the kid realize that "this problem is embarassing and I need to stop it")...but it helps direct efforts by showing people where to look for help. Anyway, I also don't think "most" adults wouldn't care about a goldfish. It's relative; if you have a family and a dog and a car, a goldfish is cheap and requires little maintenance in comparison, but I don't think it's a correct generalization to say that most adults wouldn't care.

If those kids are poking fish because they're boys, or because they have a bad life at home...the solution is twofold: Help the kids, and remove the fish from them. I don't think it's fair to only keep the fish safe; if it's within your sphere of influence, so to speak, I think you should try to improve the kid's behavior too. That way, future fish won't be poked.

Arizonagrace

Not many students or parents know that it is actually illegal to require a student to do dissection or experiments on animals. Simply claim it is against your moral and/or religious beliefs and ask for another assingment to do in place of it. That is what I did along with more then half my class when I was in high school. If they insist, ask your doctor to write a note excusing you from these activities. 90% of family doctors will do this for you.

Blub

0morrokh

OzzyFan:

Not to seem argumentative but being a debater I can't resist a good friendly debate.

I did mean that kids who mistreat animals likely have adults around them who also don't care about animals. I did not mean that all adults don't respect animals, although I think the proportion of kids and adults who don't is about equal. I too have grown up with parents who treat animals well, although I will say that my mum has said on multiple occasions that she would have seen nothing wrong with keeping fish in bowls if it had not been for raising me and picking up quite a bit about animals from me. The fact is that if I were keeping fish in bowls, my parents wouldn't be opposed to it because they wouldn't know better. I was not necessarily saying that adults purposely mistreat animals but that many of them are un- or misinformed and therefore don't "care" because they don't see a reason to care. This does not mean they were abused as children or are bad people. What it means is that they grew up with everyone keeping goldfish in bowls. If something can be kept in a bowl, then I don't think a skewed mental state is necessary to go from just looking at it in a bowl, to doing experiments or entertaining yourself with it.

I agree 100% with your last paragraph. The fish and the kids definately need to be helped. But the fact is that none are going to be helped until our society's views in general are changed. Until parents and teachers stop handing kids fish in bowls, it's unreasonable to think we can somehow convince the kids to treat goldfish nicely.

I think most adults are taking the wrong approach to solving problems like these. They see the kids abusing fish and go after the kids. But what it really all boils down to is education, and the people who need to be educated are the adults. When they start treating animals better, the kids will follow by example.

Tavel

I still can't figure out why this is being taught as the "scientific method". It doesn't demonstrate the scientific method at all, it's a terribly flawed experiment.

The intent is to establish that cold blooded animals slow down in relation to their surroundings...which is fine (you could execute humane experiments to that effect). BUT, the experiment induces shock in the specimen which produces erroneous results. Do the same thing with a mammal and the breathing would rapidly INCREASE, which would disprove that endothermic animals regulate their own metabolism in that experiment.

There's no point in gathering corrupt data...much less in teaching kids bad science. Those thinking skills stay with them for the rest of their life, and that's the real loss here.

I never did experiments on live specimens in any of my school, not even in college biology classes (short of radio tagging turtles, lol). Animals are difficult to work with and yield error strewn results. bad results and tough measurements do not help kids who are just beginning in science, they need consistent and accurate results. There are plenty of other experiments that demonstrate the concepts more concisely, no need to use animals.

COBettaCouple

True. It's certainly against ours.

0morrokh

I totally agree Tavel. There's much better ways to teach kids about science.

I also don't understand why schools are wasting their money on unnecessary live animals. Like, they could be saving up for working computers or something....

I actually didn't know that, about it being illegal to require students to experiment on animals. It doesn't really matter though cause the rest of the kids are gonna do it. They always pre-order a certain number of live/dead (for dissection) animals and then have you get into groups. If I decided not to participate it would just mean there'd be one less person in one of the groups.

COBettaCouple

That's why schools have 572 fundraisers a week. Waste & corruption sucking the money away.