Every biology student at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) must take zoology as a required course, which has a lab component that forces students to partake in animal dissections on intelligent, sentient animals such as rats. Many students are deeply uncomfortable with these exercises and may have ethical objections, but feel forced to complete them anyway because passing the laboratory component is required to pass the course.

TMU claims these dissections are in compliance with university Policy 52, which states that animal use must be minimized or replaced with suitable alternatives where possible. TMU administration thinks having students working in pairs in the lab is good enough, but if they truly complied with their own policy, these activities would be replaced with the many viable alternatives such as models or VR simulations. Instead, TMU continues to have students needlessly hack apart the bodies of intelligent animals, gawk at their organs, and chuck them in a biohazard bin at the end of the lab period.

If TMU doesn't change, countless animals will continue to be raised and slaughtered in the name of education when ethical and effective animal-free alternatives exist. These suppliers raise animals in poor conditions without much space or enrichment; TMU is directing funding this cruelty with student's tuition fees by continuing to purchase preserved specimens. Alternative learning tools are readily accessible and well-documented to equally meet learning objectives, but administration doesn't care to consider them.

Let's put pressure on TMU administration to listen to students and do the right thing: stop killing animals in the name of education. Animal dissections are no longer necessary and continuing to do them is an outdated practice. Every year in Canada, over 100,000 rats are used in CCAC-certified institutions. Let's do our part to bring that number down.