PETA offers free dissection software to schools

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) India has teamed up with software-maker Punflay to offer free of charge, the company's 'virtual frog dissection' applications to science classrooms in schools and universities. with Punflay's app, a PETA release said on Thursday.

The move comes after new guidelines issued by the ministry of environment and forests and the University Grants Commission (UGC) to replace animal dissection in life-sciences education under pressure from animal rights activists led by PETA.

"PETA India is eager to help universities and other schools take the lead in teaching biology using humane and modern methods", PETA India Science Policy Adviser Chaitanya Koduri said. Punflay's 'virtual frog dissection app' available for desktops, laptops, Macs, iPads, netbooks and interactive whiteboards simulates dissection with life-like graphics that offer a bloodless field, colour differentiation and clarity that cannot be achieved with animal dissection.

However, the decision has drawn criticism from biology teachers, who fear that the ruling will hamper anatomy lessons, producing a generation of researchers without appropriate laboratory skills. The rationale for the ban on animal testing has perplexed teachers such as Birendra Nath Mallick, a neurobiologist at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

For instance, the University Grants Commission (UGC) guidelines say that because anatomical knowledge has been expanded through advances in other branches of biology, there is now "an over-emphasis of learning of anatomy as laboratory exercises"  a view that Mallick finds "very myopic". The commission also says that its decision is based on a concern over biodiversity loss, but neither Mallick nor Mathur are aware of any data specifically linking species extinction with the use of animals for dissection.