I’m a senior in an advanced anatomy and physiology class. My passion is to become a veterinarian when I leave and head off to college. We just concluded our final lab for the year, which happened to be our biggest project. We dissected a male rat. Usually dissections don’t bother me so much, mainly because we simply had parts of an already processed animal. But doing this dissection hit me a little harder than most. Maybe it was the fact that I had to skin and see the animal as a whole, or the fact that it looked like it died writhing in pain. To me this dissection didn’t seem fair to the rat because it was grown specifically to die. I know it was for learning purposes but it just doesn’t seem humane to me. Another blow that hit me hard was watching the pregnant female get dissected, that female was supposed to have twelve babies. Those babies never had the chance to grow. I feel that growing these rats just to have them killed is cruel and unjust.