Pithing: Introduction
Every year, millions of frogs are pithed and dissected in schools in the USA and Asia as part of basic Biology curriculum.
Pithing: The Procedure
Pithing is the barbaric, cruel, and savage act of severing the spinal chord of a frog, using a knife or a pair of scissors, so that the frog is rendered unable to control his body - and supposedly also unable to feel pain. Pithing always leads to the painful and unconditional death of the frog. Pithing is done as a preparative step prior to dissection the frog. Often pithing is done only partially, due to untrained hands, leaving the frog fully alive with all of the frog's feelings, making the frog experience every excruciating cut into the frog's skin or intestines. The Internet contains actual accounts of students who have experienced frogs writher and struggle to get free from the pins that are keeping the frog nailed to the table while the frog is being cut into! Such frogs are clearly fully aware of the pain being inflicted upon them. The horror is so extreme that most simply cannot fathom it: a live frog, feeling everything done to him, being cut open and into pieces while his little heart hammers!
Recent research shows that fish feel pain (an article in Danish) just the same as any other animal and human. Obviously, the same holds true for frogs: The common notion that frogs feel no pain is wrong!
Pithing is a surgical procedure that should never be performed. However, if somebody insists on performing pithing anyway, pithing should only be performed by experienced and trained professional surgeons. Unfortunately, the frogs being pithed and dissected are most commonly pithed and dissected by students: Students who have never before done anything remotely similar. As a result, some pithing operations go horribly wrong, which leaves the frog to suffer unsurpassedly. To fathom this, imagine your 18-year old son giving you a heart by-pass operation on your kitchen table, without your son ever before having tried surgery and without you being sedated!
Pithing: The Ethics
Pithing is unethical. Pithing is a profound violation of an innocent animal who has no chance of defending itself. Pithing a frog the most horrible death anyone can ever envision for a little innocent creature: The frog is either bred in captivity or captured in the wild, his life preset into making the frog a guaranteed victim of one of the most horrorful deaths available on the planet. Then the frog is transported from his original habitat to a school or a laboratory. Then the frog is subjected to a very painful procedure of having a knife inserted into his mouth or neck, a knife which is used to sever the spinal chord of the frog. Then the knife is inserted into the skull of the frog so as to trash the brain of the frog. The badly wounded frog is then stapled to a table using small pins. Finally, the frog is dissected (cut open) while being fully alive so as to allow the students up-close study of the beating heart and other intestines inside the live frog. This is probably one of the most cruel methods of killing a live being in the history of mankind.
Pithing: The Policy
The official explanation for the use of pithing and dissection in schools is that the students that way learn how to perform basic surgical procedures. In fact, many of the students are repulsed by the procedure and many remember it with some unease and even unhappiness, which is a poor introduction to the good activity of helping beings by performing healing surgery on them. The students are aiming to learn how to care for life, so as to become great surgeons, but are in fact taught how to violate life in a most abhorrent and bizarre manner: The frog is involuntarily subjected to being a patient, yet the initially healthy frog does not in any way benefit from the medical procedure. On the contrary, the frog is harmed fatally in a cruel and painful manner so traumatic that the frog could never experience anything like this in Nature. Thus people who should learn to care the most for life are taught how to not care all by being forced to ignore and suppress the unease and sorrow of inflicting needless pain upon a healthy and helpless being. A healthy frog is sacrificed for teaching the student how to suppress his or her natural sense of compassion and reason: Steps which are necessary to complete the inhuman and evil process of pithing a frog. Think about it for a while: Do you prefer a compassionate and sensible doctor, or do you prefer a cold and senseless doctor? The compassionate and sensible doctor will become less compassionate and sensible after having pithed a frog as pithing the frog requires the aspiring doctor to ignore and suppress his or her own feelings! The pithing operation in itself guides the aspiring surgeons onto the wrong path of behavior in his or her future profession!
Pithing: The Frog View
If you cannot agree that pithing and dissecting frogs is insane and unethical, imagine yourself being the frog:
You were either raised in captivity, every day being pretty boring but also, normally, completely safe to you, or you were born as a free frog in Nature, living in an environment without borders and nobody ever handling you. One day, without prior warning, you are put into a small box. Then the box shuffles about a bit. Then the box shakes for many hours as you are shipped to your destination. You are deeply confused and very afraid as you have no idea of what is going on. You only know that you are being moved somewhere you can't see. Then, suddenly, somebody opens the box and lifts you out of the box. A pair of untrained hands holds you, squeezes you a bit, hurts your leg when you attempt to jump away. Somebody with gigantic eyes looks at you a bit, even laughs a bit at you, and turns you upside-down a few times (which scares you deeply). Then there's a little pause: A little quiet, a little break while you are being held by someone. Then, suddenly somebody begins to shove a knife into your mouth. You scream in despair and fear. Somebody emits loud disturbing sounds ("Hihi, it wriggles!"). Then the knife cuts into you. The pain is agonizing. The shock stuns you. Then you are laid on your back on the table, and pins are inserted through your arms and your legs: More pain. You lay dazed for a while, trying to recover. You can't do a thing. You kind of thought it couldn't get any worse than it already was. Suddenly you feel something touching your belly. It feels odd. A knife is cutting open your belly, while you are lying stunned trying to recover. The pain is strong but you don't have the strength to move after the cut into your brain. While you are dizzy, somebody cuts flaps into your belly, lifts aside the flaps, and pins the flaps to the table. You begin to recover, although not yet enough to actually start struggling to get free. Your organs are lifted out, one by one. After 5 or 10 minutes, you regain enough strengh to make a dash for freedom. You are only half aware that half your guts have been lifted out of you and are lying around you on the table. Finally you gather up energy and pull strongly in your arms and your legs. Lo and behold! You manage to get free. Now you only need to escape and find some nice pond somewhere. You turn over and start jumping away -- with pins sticking out your arms and legs, and your intestines trailing behind you. You haven't fully realized it yet, but your days are numbered: No matter what you do, you die today!
David K. Farkas reports about an already dissected frog jumping again and again against the walls of the glass pail that he had been put in after having managed to pull free of the pins: "My frog, however, WAS a toughie, and for an hour we all heard the resonant ping of the four pins as he threw himself against the wall of the pail." Think it over, feel it! Speak about horror!
Pithing: The Issue
Think it through: Can you possibly imagine any death worse than being dissected alive? I can't. Millions of frogs are dissected alive each and every year! Try to imagine an innocent little frog entering into its absolutely worst nightmare, a nightmare so bad that Nature never could replicate or outperform it: A man-made nightmare killing you slowly over 15 minutes in the most painful and traumatic manner anybody could possibly envision. The frog's fault? None. The frog simply was as unhappy as to be born a frog of a frog species that is used in Biology classes. Compare this to slavery, please: Slavery sounds so cozy and warm compared to a frog being pithed and dissected while alive! (Think of the frog as a human and you'll begin to grasp the horror of it all.)
The little useful that the students learn from the frog pithing and dissection lesson, they could easily learn from a model frog that could be disassembled and reassembled -- over and over without harming anyone. A game could be invented where the objective was to guess the location of the given piece: The students could play this game an hour each week for a month and they'd have a pretty good idea of the makeup of a frog. The knowledge could be taught in any number of ways that would not harm a single living being, let alone an innocent frog.
Pithing: The Trend
The worldwide trend is clearly a move away from pithing and dissection of frogs: Several states of the USA, including California, have enacted legislation mandating that alternatives to frog pithing and dissection be provided for the students. Still needed, though, is that every country of Earth completely bans frog pithing and dissection, no matter the circumstances, no matter the excuses: No matter the explanations, there's never a sane argument for torturing a small helpless being to death.
Pithing: The Evaluation
We don't want to be blamed for being all emotional about the frog pithing and dissection issue; it is a very emotional issue nearly making adults feel like crying when thinking of the poor little frogs being transported to their deaths. (Frogs have brains, you know! Frogs are actually capable of wondering what will happen to them!). So, we've prepared a formal analysis of the issue of anatomy studies on frogs:
Legend:
i) issue
p) proposal(score)
+) argument for
-) argument against
r) resolution
i) To learn anatomy by studying frogs
p) Pithe and dissect a live frog. (-6)
+) The students actually do get some hands-on experience.
+) The students actually do learn something about anatomy.
-) This kills millions of innocent frogs each year.
-) Each frog experiences the most traumatic death possible.
-) Many frogs are killed in inhuman ways by untrained hands.
-) Surgeons should learn to care, not to not-care (surgeons
should not learn to suppress their feelings!)
-) Surgeons should learn to help, not to kill helpless beings.
-) Many students don't really like this procedure but comply mostly to
avoid standing apart from the rest of the class.
-) The students are behaving in an unethical manner.
-) Surgeons should learn to be ethical, not how to murder helpless victims.
p) Dissect a dead frog. (-3)
+) The students actually do get some hands-on experience.
+) The students actually do learn something about anatomy.
-) This kills millions of innocent frogs each year.
-) Surgeons should learn to help, not to simply consume.
-) Many students don't really like this procedure but comply mostly
to avoid standing apart from the rest of the class.
-) The students are behaving in an unethical manner (a frog died!).
-) Surgeons should learn to be ethical, not how to crave murder victims.
p) Dissect a virtual frog using computer software (+5).
+) The students actually do learn something about anatomy.
+) Not a single frog dies for this purpose.
+) The students learn that when not helping they can only be exploring
(learn by helping!).
+) Every student can be happy about the procedure.
+) Every student can get a copy of the virtual frog dissection software.
+) Awesome virtual frog dissection software exists (see http://www.froguts.com!).
-) The students do not get actual hands-on experience.
p) Disassemble and reassemble a model frog. (+6)
+) The students actually do get some hands-on experience.
+) The students actually do learn something about anatomy.
+) Not a single frog need die needlessly.
+) The students learn that when not helping they can only be
disassembling (learn by helping!).
+) Every student can get a model frog for their future office
(also good for future exams!).
+) Every student can be happy about the procedure.
+) The students are behaving in an ethical manner.
-) The model frog is not as realistic as neither a real frog nor an
animated virtual frog dissection. (This could probably be
overcome with the use of new synthetic materials resembling in
texture every part of the frog).
r) To disassemble and reassemble a model frog.
The conclusion is that the best way to teach the students is through disassembling and reassembling a model frog. The second best way to teach the students is through virtual frog dissection software. The worst way to teach the students is through pithing and dissecting a live frog.
The difference between the model frog exercise and the virtual dissection exercise being so tiny, only one point, that both are good alternatives.
Pithing: The Solution
At Frogsite.org we blisfully, eagerly, happily, and strongly recommend the Froguts software. Priced VERY reasonably, at $300 per school per year, Froguts is the OBVIOUS choice for allowing the student to perform a virtual dissection.
The Froguts.com virtual frog dissection experience is truly AWESOME! The graphics is wonderful, the software is perfect, and even the sounds are brilliant.
Froguts.com is a must! Until you have tried out the www.froguts.com demo yourself, you have not seen how awesome and brilliant a virtual frog dissection experience can be! www.froguts.com brings computer software to a new divine level!
Bless yourself: Go try the www.froguts.com demo now!
(Truly speaking, the www.froguts.com experience makes us a bit sad that the evaluation resolves to disassembling and reassembling a model frog, but the model frog solution and the virtual dissection solution evaluate to nearly the same: 6 and 5, respectively.)
With www.froguts.com there's NO excuse for dissecting a real frog!
Pithing: The Campaign
YOU (yes, you reading this) CAN make a BIG difference! Set aside 5 or 10 hours for helping the frogs. Devote 5 or 10 hours of your personal life to the frogs. Write some local schools (simply run through the list in your local register), your local politicians, your politician in congress, especially the minister of education, and even the president (prime minister) of your country! Write local television stations and ask them to feature a show about the horrifying fate of frogs in education! Write everybody somehow related to the use of real frogs in education. Wake up the system! Make people alert that frogs are sacrificed for no good use! Make the politicians everywhere BAN pithing and dissection of frogs. You may copy this page freely in your letters to stop pithing and dissection of frogs! If you're new to this kind of activity, know this:
- It is quite easy to word letters to politicians, simply imagine you're writing your daughter, and that she's loosing it somehow.
- Despite your worst fears, you won't be considered a terrorist nor a traitor; voicing an opinion directly to politicians is a very common thing today: The politicians receive letters all the time about all sorts of issues and definitely don't mind learning about the traumatic situation of the frogs in education. You are in fact helping to make your country a better country, and most politicians can see this nowadays.
- It may seem difficult at first, but try it out three times before you judge whether you will do it or not. You'll find that it is a piece of cake, easier than calling a plummer, and that you feel a deep satisfaction of actually helping the world to become better.
- Think of the millions of peaceful little frogs being slaughtered every year...
If you have got a website on frogs, please make a link to this page on the front page of (the frog relevant part of) your website. Alternatively, please make one or more pages about banning pithing and dissection of frogs. Help spread the word, save some frogs already today.
If you're short of a hobby, then make saving frogs your new hobby: Join existing anti-vivisection organisations (who fight against the use of animals in lab experiments) with your pet peeve being the banning of all pithing and all dissection of frogs, dead as live. The ultimate goal being that every country legally bans frog pithing and frog dissection so that not even dead frogs may be dissected (if you allow dissection of dead frogs, some "vendor" will kill the frog prior to the school receiving the frog, and nothing's been gained)!
Millions of frogs will die in school labs or at vendor's factories next year if you don't do anything! Act now!
Pithing: The Question
Would you be afraid of leaving your little daughter with a frog? No. Should a frog be afraid of being left with your daughter in Biology class? No.
Pithing: Links
A touching article on frog murder:
A description of an actual catastrophic frog pithing operation:
This article in itself proves that real-world pithing operations actually do fail!
An insightful treatment of the issue of dissection:
