Bring Old School Biology Back!

So I have just finished my exam for Mammalogy.  I have to admit I took this module having not done much on vertebrates previously, in fact I've more or less been more specialised to invertebrates and botany until recently.  I have surprised myself at how much knowledge I have gleaned this last few months.  I now know about animals around the world, the weird, the wonderful and everything in between.  Don't get me wrong, I wasn't completely without knowledge about mammals before hand, being someone who is interested I have done a fair amount of reading in my time, as well as watching the great god that is David Attenborough many times on the idiot box.

However,  when talking to people in general conversation it shocked me how much general lack of knowledge there is about mammals.  There are those that think birds are mammals and that bats are birds!  This isn't as unheard of as you may think.  And, given the fact that these days most children will walk out of school never having dissected an insect, let alone an amphibian, reptile or mammal, and that these same students will if capable go to university and if they study biology again will probably never physically do a dissection of an animal, it isn't all together surprising.

I do not like the needless killing or suffering of animals.  No sane person who reveres the natural world we live in would.  However to understand the processes and the physiology of an animal, and to even begin to relate that animal to being similar to you and I, we must look at revisiting some of the odd school biology.  I have even been questioned on my ethics of using pitfall traps or ethanol to kill invertebrates quickly to later be able to reliably identify them (some have to be dissected, so that you can identify them by their genitalia).  This worry about dissection is because of peoples sensibilities about killing an animal.  How many of these people will only wear leather shoes, eat a nice fat steak, or enjoy a weekly roast meal on a Sunday?  Are these people ever leaving their homes, driving a car, riding a bike?  How many poor little ladybirds are squished on the motorways in these peoples daily commutes?  We have to use common sense.  If we want people to know about mammals and the welfare of them, the workings of them, then we need this in schools again; rather than having a culture where we become ever more divorced from the animals that often end up on our plates or on our backs.   Ask a young child where milk comes from, and you are most likely to be told it came from a well known supermarket; many children have never been to a working farm and as we are at an age and economic climate where it becomes a necessity for parents to work more and more hours the family discussions suffer, and these issues definitely become something for the back burner.  Before you condemn me I am not talking about mass murder of lots of animals for dissection purposes, but you know there are plenty of rats and chicks bred, gassed and frozen to feed snakes, owls etc, why not have a few given to a school once a year so that young people get a real idea of science, and not just what they see in a book or more likely a youtube video.  Ask a kid where the pancreas is, or the liver or spleen and see if they know?  Or what their functions are.  Learning it from a book just doesn't give it the context you need to make it concrete in your learning.

Biology should be fun, it should be practical with lots of hands on experience; if we want to be leaders in this field then we have to be realistic about the subject, and make it something that is tangible to all that study it.   Maybe then we will become more interested in the species around us, and feel more closely connected.