Project Lead The Way: Keep Fetal Pigs, Sheep Brains, and Cow Eyes out of Classrooms

Students go to school to learn, not to mutilate the corpses of fetal pigs and the organs of animals who’ve been violently killed, as Project Lead The Way supports.

Project Lead The Way Has Students Cutting Into Fetal Pigs and Cow Eyes

Project Lead The Way is a STEM curriculum company that uses animals such as fetal pigs and organs such as sheep brains and hearts, cow eyes, and pig kidneys for dissection. At slaughterhouses, workers cut pregnant pigs’ stomachs open and take their babies to be used for dissection. Other animals’ body parts are doused with formaldehyde before they’re vacuum-sealed in plastic bags.

Despite Project Lead The Way’s misleading name and its website’s claim that the company is “reinventing the classroom experience,” it hasn’t fully embraced modern, sustainable, humane, chemical-free technology like SynFrog and virtual programs—which can be used again and again until the information is absorbed—in favor of archaic and potentially unsafe “lessons” in which students cut into corpses, poke around at monochromatic guts, and throw the dead animals in the garbage when they’re done.

The company says that its mission is to empower “students to thrive in an evolving world,” yet it hypocritically ignores all the superior options that are readily available and continues to promote exposing students to the chemically preserved carcasses and body parts of tormented animals, thus holding them back from, well, thriving in an evolving world. Project Lead The Way, it’s time for you to evolve.

Dissection Is Not Only Unnecessary but Also Potentially Harmful to Students

Can we all agree that the point of biology class is to teach students anatomy and physiology? Neither of these studies requires carving into dead, embalmed animals. The only thing dissection teaches students is to see animals as tools—fostering callousness and instilling speciesism in impressionable minds. A sound education cannot contradict sound ethics.

Peer-reviewed literature confirms that students who use modern dissection methods perform better in learning assessments than those who dissect animals. Studies show that as many as 25% of secondary students object to dissecting animals and that doing so can dissuade them from pursuing a career in biology and health sciences.

How You Can Help

Since 2019, PETA has urged Project Lead The Way to embrace humane teaching tools and remove animal dissection—we even met with the company and provided information. There’s no good reason for it to live in the past—putting students’ futures at risk—especially when claiming to be a leader. Help us get the message across by posting a polite comment on Project Lead The Way’s Facebook page.

You can also take the following actions to help students and animals:

• Take rapid action against cruel animal experiments at colleges and universities.
• Pledge to cut out dissection today.
• Inquire about getting revolutionary new technology that makes ethical dissection labs possible in your own school.

Animal dissection is irrelevant in today’s world of modern technology, and insisting on animal dissection fails students, educators, and animals. Project Lead The Way, leave animals’ bodies alone and cut dissection from your curriculum instead.