Abolishing vivisection in intro lab doesn't threaten education

The following is an open letter to the Neuroscience Department:

We have reached an unfortunate impasse in the animal rights debate on campus and I am proposing a new approach. We should stop the vivisection (experimentation on live animals) in the Neuroscience 211 intro lab. Rather than the continuing demand to stop all vivisection at Oberlin, I am narrowing my sights.

There are three significant reasons for such a proposal:

1) A student can take the NSCI intro lab without having ever taken a college biology course. If vivisection is going to continue at Oberlin, I think all students involved in the maiming or taking of lives should have a college science background first.

2) As this is an intro lab, many students who take it are not Neuroscience majors or medical students (human or veterinary). Many of the participants in previous vivisections at Oberlin will never use that "skill" again, and it therefore will certainly not further the cause of medical research. In an upper level Neuroscience class it is more likely that students involved in animal experimentation will use it for a human good, but that is the exception rather than the rule in the Intro lab.

3) According to our Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee guidelines, and the words of many Neuro professors, all animal use must be necessary. A student in NSCI 211 can observe the vivisection but not participate, as per the syllabus, and that is enough of the learning process for the Professors to grant course credit. If students are not required to participate, how can it be necessary? There are important skills requiring animal use that people need to learn, but the use of living beings should be limited to those who will actually use that knowledge for the betterment of the world. (Keeping more humans alive longer is a dubious "good" in the obvious light of human overpopulation and consumption, but that is another issue.) Abolishing vivisection in this intro lab does not stop those students who need the experience of live animal experimentation from getting it.

I understand that there are students who come to Oberlin for specific educations, which include animal experimentation. And those students who are here for that will be taking upper level courses involving the use of live non-human beings for their education, but I both question the legitimacy of saying that the current labs in Introductory Neuroscience are necessary and I ask for the permanent cessation of vivisection in the NSCI 211 lab as of next semester.

Josh Raisler Cohen is a College senior