Anticipation for First Dissection Lab

I am looking forward to the dissection labs. Ever since I started eating chickens and working with chickens, I wondered how they worked. Hopefully, that’s what I will learn in lab. I have had some experience with dissections while working with Dr. Macklin’s labs, and it was fascinating. It was amazing to see how chickens are put together, and how everything has to work together just right in order for the chicken to stay healthy.

Two of the fears that I had before these dissections and that I still have before these coming labs are death and smell. I am not really a huge fan of death. I grew up raising various livestock, and the number one rule with livestock growing is “Make sure they don’t die,” so this high amount of death at one time was and still is a shock for me. I remember going out to check on my 6 week old turkey polts when I was in high school, just to find that several of them were dead and the rest were very sick. That high amount of death and sickness was hard for me to deal with. Their death, to me, was pointless. I was taught that the only time it was good/useful to kill an animal was to eat it, so to kill an entire small flock of chickens just to drive home a point, and then throw them away like garbage is a huge shift for me. I understand that this is a useful way of learning, and that the entire purpose of a broiler chicken is to die for one use or another. Furthermore, I understand that the entire purpose of the broiler industry is to ultimately kill the chickens that we care for; but it is just a huge shift from what I grew up learning that will take some getting used to. Also, the methods of euthanasia that we use are somewhat haunting for me. I really don’t like killing the chickens with my bare hands (cervical dislocation) or watching them suffocate in a CO2 chamber, but I understand that it has to be done and I hope to get better at accepting it throughout these labs.

The other thing that I was scared of and am still scared about is smells. I don’t really handle bad smells very well, so I am afraid of what smells I may encounter throughout these labs. In a past dissection that I did in Dr. Berry’s intro class, we dissected 10 week old broilers that had been frozen for a week and only partially thawed when we started. Those birds smelled awful, so it was hard to concentrate on the dissection. But I hope to get better at handling these types of smells throughout the course of these labs.