The swamp? You idiot! That's the first place they'll look.

I walked into the phsyiology lab and was greeted with the faint smell of something fishy and yet . . . not. My prof, a lovely grandfatherly English fellow with frazzled white hair and a big ponch, came waltzing over and told us how to set up all the dials on our complicated machine that goes "bing!" (also known as a polygraph). My group set off to grab our other equipment as I frantically read through the lab. Me being me, I never read anything till the last minute unless absolutely necessary.

I flipped the page in my manual and gasped. We were going to be doing that ultra cool experiment where you hook up dead frogs to electrodes much like ol' Galvani did back in the day!!!! Oh cmon! all you geeks who went into science must have at one point or another fantasized about galvanizing a dead frog! Yah? No? NO?!

Oh. OK.

Well, then I guess you all haven't had that dream about snogging Darwin on the Beagle either then . . .

*awkward silence*

Aaaand moving on.

My lab group returned with a box and a huge green frog. They laid it on the table and I glanced down at it. A huge bloody hole was right in the middle of its forehead. It had been pithed. It could still breathe and stuff, but it was technically brain dead and cognitively on par with a wet noodle. I poked at it. It continued to stare up at the ceiling with a blank expression.

Satisfied it couldn't feel anything, we skinned its leg and pulled out the gastrocnemius muscle (which is just a fancy shmancy way of saying 'calf muscle)'. We tied this up with a brown thread to a spring attached onto our little stand thingy and inserted an electrode into the leg. Next we had to make sure that the frog would stay in the same place and not jump off our stand once we stimulated it. We went up to our TAs and asked how we were to do this. They silently handed us a nail and a hammer. We stood there holding the tools and looked at one another.
"You do it!."
"No YOU do it."
"Forget it! I'm not nailing that thing down!"
"Fine! you hold the nail and I'll hammer it in"
"Fine!"

*BAM BAM*

"It's crooked! We have to take it out and do it again!"
"Well it wouldn't be crooked it you'd held it right in the first place."
"Whatever!"

Much chaos ensued and after ten minutes of arguing and hammering the nail through the little frog's knee, we were finally set up.

We turned on our machine that goes 'bing' and held our breaths.

The frog muscle started jumping and twitching and the machine spewed out gridpaper with a squiggly line across it resembling the printout from a lie detector machine. We 'ooohed' and 'aaaaaahed' and turned the machine off. I lifted the towel that we had placed over the frog's head and squirted more water onto it. It continued to look blindly up at nothing. Poor little guy.

After another two hours of electrode probing, drug injections, minor arguments with my prof about the ethics of using amphibians in the lab, and more gastrocnemius twitching we let Kermit rest in peace.

It was an interesting experience and quite a change from dealing with all the warm, furry animals. Obviously, it would have been nice not to have to kill the frog, but after what we did to it, I'm thinking it was for the better.

Honestly though, considering the worldwide decline of amphibians, would it not be better to simply kill one frog for the demo? Did they really have to kill 15 frogs to teach us how a muscle twitches? The amphibian lover and conservationist in me is outraged. We mentioned it to our profs and the only answer they could give us was that "It's always been done this way."

Later in the year, we have a terminal lab where we get to work on dogs. At the end of the lab, we euthanize the dogs. The dogs are anaesthetized for the whole thing and it's all really humane. Somehow, I feel less bad about that than I do about the frogs. For one thing, the dogs we are going to use are all scheduled to be euthanised anyhow and they are dogs that were not suitable for adoption (at least that's what I've heard). For another thing, dogs are not endangered world wide and in the future, euthanizing dogs is a clinical skill that I will need. Frogs, on the other hand, are a threatened group of animals and I really don't believe that they have any clinical significance for us as vet students.

Right. And I believe I've gotten carried away again. But think about it! It's awful!