Holiday Delivery! Local Student Helps School Cut Out Dissection With Lifelike Three-Dimensional ‘Frogs’

For Immediate Release:
December 16, 2021

Contact:
Nicole Meyer 202-483-7382

Christmas came early this year to Rollings Middle School of the Arts, thanks to 13-year-old student Alayna Flaugher and her mother, Kaylie, who teamed up with TeachKind, PETA’s humane education division, to make a special delivery. Today, Alayna gave a gift to the school’s science teachers: SynFrogs, hyper-realistic synthetic frogs that replace the use of real frogs in dissection. She was inspired to organize the delivery because she wants animal dissection to belong only in the school’s history class by the time her younger sister becomes a middle school student. Alayna asked her mom for help, and the two contacted TeachKind.

Photos are available here.

“Dissecting frogs is really upsetting because they are taken out of nature and killed, and it’s unnecessary, too,” says Alayna. “I hope that when teachers see how great the SynFrog is, they’ll spare real frogs from that fate so that my sister and other students will never have to cut into an animal’s body.”

“Thanks to Alayna Flaugher’s initiative and compassion, science teachers at Rollings Middle School of the Arts are now equipped with a revolutionary teaching tool that leaves animal dissection in the dust,” says PETA Senior Director of Youth Programs Marta Holmberg. “TeachKind encourages this school to get on Santa’s ‘nice’ list by switching to the SynFrog, for everyone’s sake.”

Frogs are killed by the millions for classroom dissection. The SynFrog is trauma-free and teaches students that they don’t have to harm animals for dissection—a practice that fosters callousness toward animals, turns off some students from careers in science, and contributes to frogs’ declining populations in nature.

TeachKind is also offering to donate additional SynFrogs—if the school does right by frogs and its students and ends animal dissection.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information about TeachKind, please visit TeachKind.org or follow the group on Facebook or Instagram.