Why did the Houston Humane Society host a Halloween dissection lab?

Inviting tweens and teens to dissect snakes is not the same thing as inviting them to carve jackolanterns

            HOUSTON, Texas––“Learn about snakes with the Houston Humane Society,”  social media ads aimed at “tweens” and teens from ages 10 to 18 opened in mid-October 2024.

But these ads were not promoting a typical humane education reptile show with an expert handler safely exhibiting live snakes of non-venomous and non-constricting species.

“Just what goes on inside of a snake?”

Continued the Houston Humane Society pitch to prospective participants,  “Ever wondered just what goes on inside of a snake as it slithers across the ground?  This is the workshop for you! Join educators from the Houston Humane Society Wildlife Center as we explore the internal anatomy of one of the world’s most misunderstood animals.”

Translation:  snakes were to be dissected at the McGovern-Stella Link Neighborhood Library after school hours on October 23,  2024.

“While snakes may seem scary at first glance,”  the Houston Humane Society pitch added,  “these animals are actually extremely fragile and thus,  fearful of humans!”

With good reason.  If a snake cannot escape a humane society wildlife center alive and unharmed,  who will give a snake a break?

Snake abortion for “Halloween Fun”

Boasted the Houston Humane Society in a follow-up posting to Facebook,  “Notably,  one student bravely completed the dissection of a previously pregnant snake, revealing nearly a dozen baby snakes to the class.”

In deeply conservative,  Bible-thumping Houston,  where 40% of the population purport to be evangelical fundamentalist Christians,  this was obviously not described as an exercise in abortion.

But the posting was hashtagged “#HalloweenFun.”

Carolina Specimen

Asked Facebooker Cindy Tauer-Eckart,  a third-generation Houston area realtor:  “Where did they get the snakes that were dissected?”

Responded Barbara Lauren Schmeitz,  apparently speaking for the Houston Humane Society,  if perhaps unofficially,  “Carolina Specimen, a common vendor for organisms.”

Schmeitz provided a link to the company.

To a humane society doing due diligence about business associates,  this alone should have set off alarms.

Carolina Specimen,  founded by Thomas E. Powell as Carolina Biological Supply in 1917,  is reputedly the largest and oldest supplier of classroom dissection subjects in the world.

PETA campaign target

As Carolina Biological Supply,  the company became a campaign target of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals [PETA] after the USDA Animal & Plant Health Inspection service in 1986 fined a cat carcass vendor named Al Wise $6,000 for failing to keep adequate records and not holding cats for at least five days so that owners might find them.

Wise apparently collected live cats,  then gassed them with carbon monoxide in a chamber provided by Carolina Biological Supply before selling them to Carolina Biological Supply.

Despite that episode,  PETA undercover investigators Bill Dollinger and Virginia Bollinger in 1989 “filmed cats being unloaded from supplier Al Wise’s truck and gassed with carbon monoxide in a company chamber,”  summarized Sarah Avery of the Greensboro.com Alamance Bureau a year later.

“Lawful business” said district attorney

“The pictures allegedly show company employees assisting in the work,  in violation of USDA rules that prohibit Carolina Biological from killing cats without the proper waiting period,”  Avery wrote.

Alamance County District Attorney Steve Balog concluded,  he told media,  that “Carolina Biological Supply Company is involved in a business that is lawful under current local,  state and federal laws.”

PETA continued to pursue the case.  Related allegations against Carolina Biological Supply went to trial on March 8,  2001 in Greensboro,  North Carolina.  Carolina Biological Supply was charged with seven violations of the Animal Welfare Act, including allegedly embalming 10 live cats.

Found not guilty

Carolina Biological Supply was reportedly found not guilty in January 2012,  after 22 years of litigation,  when North Carolina state judge David Baker ruled that the PETA evidence had been illegally obtained.

The issue for animal advocates,  however,  was not whether the evidence was legally obtained,  but whether what PETA alleged Al Wise and Carolina Biological Supply were doing was really going on.

Humane societies have almost unanimously opposed dissection for 200 years

The humane community worldwide has almost unanimously opposed killing animals for dissection exhibitions for just about exactly 200 years, beginning almost as soon as the London SPCA,  which became the Royal SPCA in 1840,  was formed in 1824.

Indeed,  humane opposition to dissection exhibitions preceded the formation of the London SPCA by more than a century,  beginning with moral criticism of the practice of skinning and disemboweling convicted criminals alive before crowds in the name of “scientific” education.

Though dissection has always been performed with an educational pretext,  it originated as cruel public entertainment around the time that burning witches and cats alive passed out of vogue.

Relatively little dissection was done by actual scientists and medical or veterinary students until late in the 19th century.

The Eighth Amendment

Meanwhile,  the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was adopted in 1789 as part of the Bill of Rights in response to early antivivisection activism,  “vivisection” meaning the dissection of live rather than dead specimens.

After dissection exhibitors lost access to living human criminals to supply their gruesome public shows,  they turned to using the remains of recently executed criminals,  as depicted by the British artist William Hogarth (1697-1764),  among others,  and to using live animals,  especially dogs.

Antivivisectionism then refocused on animal use.

By the early 20th century,  antivivisectionism reinforced by the rise of the humane movement threatened to bring about the legal abolition of vivisection throughout Europe and North America,  against the fierce opposition of both dissection exhibitors and the scientific community.

Charles Darwin

Asked for his views on the matter in 1874,  Charles Darwin,  author of The Origin of Species (1859),  tried to side with fellow scientists while opposing cruelty.

“I quite agree that it [vivisection] is justifiable for real investigations on physiology,”  Darwin wrote,  “but not for mere damnable and detestable curiosity.”

Eventually,  in the early 20th century a political compromise was reached:  public dissection would end;  dissection of dead specimens would be moved into schoolrooms,  as a mandatory curriculum exercise;  and as dissection became accepted,  opposition to vivisection in university laboratories faded for about fifty years.

Massachusetts enacted the compromise in 1894

The political compromise was in 1894 succinctly embodied in Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 272: Section 80G. Experiments on vertebrates; vivisection, dissection of animals; care:

“No school principal, administrator or teacher shall allow any live vertebrate to be used in any elementary or high school under state control or supported wholly or partly by public money of the state as part of a scientific experiment or for any other purpose in which said vertebrates are experimentally medicated or drugged in a manner to cause painful reactions or to induce painful or lethal pathological conditions, or in which said vertebrates are injured through any other type of treatment, experiment or procedure including but not limited to anesthetization or electric shock,  or where the normal health of said animal is interfered with or where pain or distress is caused.

“No person shall, in the presence of a pupil in any elementary or high school under state control or supported wholly or partly by public money of the state,  practice vivisection,  or exhibit a vivisected animal.

“Dissection of dead animals or any portions thereof in such schools shall be confined to the class room and to the presence of pupils engaged in the study to be promoted thereby,  and shall in no case be for the purpose of exhibition.”

Humane opposition to dissection has never ceased

Currently,  after more than 30 years of litigation by conscientious objectors to mandatory student and faculty participation in dissection,  it is still mandated in 32 states.

But humane opposition to killing animals for dissection has never ceased.

When the American Humane Association and American SPCA retreated from the issue in the mid-20th century,  the Animal Welfare Institute,  Humane Society of the U.S.,  National Catholic Animal Welfare Society,  and other national voices took it up,  alongside the American Antivivisection Society,  National Antivivisection Society,  and New England Antivivisection Society––and that was before the rise of the animal rights movement in the late 20th century.

Animal rights movement brought more opposition

Since the rise of the animal rights movement,  hundreds of newer humane organizations have risen in opposition to dissection,  some pursuing legislation and litigation,  others supporting individual local conscientious objectors among students and faculty.

National organizations helping conscientious objectors to dissection include the Animal Legal Defense Fund,  whose member lawyers have represented students opposed to killing animals for dissection for more than 30 years;  Animalearn, the educational division of the American Anti-Vivisection Society ,  formed in 1990;  and the BioLEAP Alternatives Lending Library,  which also administers the National Anti-vivisection Society Dissection Hotline,  1-800-922-FROG [3764]) “providing information, counseling and support for students,  parents and teachers who object to dissection.

Dissection opposition abroad

Several humane societies,  especially abroad,  have taken the lead in developing computer software to replace dissection in biological education.

The Blue Cross of India has since 1987 developed and distributed simulated dissections of frogs,  pigeons,  rats,  cockroaches,  earthworms,  and rabbits,  successfully enough that it May 1997 the Indian Ministry of Human Resource Development agreed to make dissection optional in high school classrooms nationwide.

That went well enough that in November 2011 the University Grants Commission of India asked Indian universities to phase out classroom dissection in both undergraduate and postgraduate studies.  This request might potentially have saved an estimated three million rodents,  two million fish,  a million birds,  a million frogs,  and as many as nine million insects,  mollusks,  and arthropods per year.

Nick Jukes has been everywhere,  man

The British-based International Network for Humane Education,  better known as InterNiche has done similar work,  including throughout eastern Europe and the Middle East,  since 1988.

Finding any nation with a science curriculum where InterNiche traveling coordinator Nick Jukes has not done presentations,  including many nations that are usually hostile toward western visitors,  is a bit like a rendition of the 1959 country-western song hit “I’ve been everywhere,”  except that the soft-spoken Jukes lacks the braggadocio of the song narrator.

The Animal Ethics Unit of the National SPCA of South Africa has since 2013 celebrated National Science Week with presentations of alternatives to dissection for high school students.

Software allows expansion of dissection-based teaching without using animals

The Canadian Centre for Alternatives to Animal Methods at the University of Windsor has since 2019 reportedly worked with the Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board to eliminate animal dissections in classrooms.

Paradoxically,  the introduction of increasingly realistic dissection software,  easier,  cleaner,  safer,  and less expensive for children to use,  has coincided with expansion of dissection-based science lessons from high schools down into middle schools and even elementary schools.

Animal control agencies supplied cadavers

Some animal control agencies have historically saved the expense of cremating or burying the remains of euthanized dogs and cats by selling or simply donating the carcasses to dissection supply companies including Sargeant’s Wholesale Biologicals in Auburn,  California,  LBS Biological Inc. of Haw River,  Nebraska,  and Nasco International,  of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin.

Interest among U.S. dissection suppliers in expanding carcass acquisition from animal shelters appeared to increase for several years after the World Society for the Protection of Animals [WSPA,  now called World Animal Protection] on March 25, 1994 announced it had exposed a major Mexican pet theft ring that supplied cats for dissection.

Mexican dissection supply scandal

Operating for at least eight years,  the ring was organized by several American residents of Mexico.  According to WSPCA investigator John Walsh,  children were paid $1.00 apiece to catch cats.  Trucked in lots of 30 to 40 to Mexicali,  the cats were drowned about 10 at a time in water barrels,  preserved with formaldehyde,  and hauled to a location in Sinaloa state,  where they were sold for $7.00 each to U.S. dissection supply companies.

Obtaining animal remains from animal control agencies was touted by dissection suppliers as a “humane” alternative to buying them from foreign sources.

By 2005,  however,  participating in dissection supply in any manner had become so unpopular with the public that in DuPage County,  Illinois,  a suburb of Chicago,  an animal control director was reportedly fired when caught furnishing cat and dog carcasses for classroom dissection.

      (See Should giving shelter dogs & cats to university labs count as “live release”?)

No humane society involvement in dissection before Houston Humane

Though some animal shelters might still do it,  ANIMALS 24-7 has discovered no record of any animal shelter furnishing animal remains for dissection since 2005,  and no record of any humane society ever actually conducting or in any other way promoting dissection before the Houston Humane Society Wildlife Center exercise at the McGovern-Stella Link Neighborhood Library on October 23,  2024.

The closest approach to a precedent appears to have been that International Wolf Center founder and wolf biologist David L. Mech on June 18,  2020 dissected a beaver for visitors,  to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the center.

Mech,  however,  now 87,  has never even pretended to be part of the humane community.  Rather,  Mech is a hunter,  fur trapper,  and senior research biologist for the U.S. Geological Survey.  This is the agency that housed the federal extermination agency called Animal Damage Control early in Mech’s career,  later transferred to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and now called USDA Wildlife Services.

What does the Houston Humane Society really believe?

Professes the Houston Humane Society Wildlife Center website,  “We believe in the inherent worth and dignity of all living things. We value the life of every animal that enters our care and vow to treat each animal humanely, and with respect and compassion.  Although our goal is to release all animals back to the wild,  we hold ourselves accountable to do what is best for each individual animal.”

So,  regardless of supply source,  does the Houston Humane Society Wildlife Center believe dissection is humane and compassionate,  and that being killed for dissection was best for each individual snake?

The Houston Humane Society Wildlife Center,  formerly the independently operated Texas Wildlife Rehabilitation Center,  was acquired by the Houston Humane Society through merger in September 2022.

Houston Humane Society president and chief executive officer Gary Poon,  the highest ranking Asian-American in the history of U.S. humane work,  succeeded 40-year president Sherry Ferguson in 2019,  after 21 years as chief financial officer.

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