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THE TEEN
WHO JUST
SAID "NO!"
How a 15-Year-Old Woman
Turned A School
System Upside Down
Jeni Graham (left) with her
mother, Pat. Jeni took on the entire
Los Angeles school system
when she refused to dissect a
frog. Jeni's action has stimulated
support for animal rights
issues throughout the world.
© Roberta Kalechofsky - 1988
Interview by Roberta Kalechofsky
"...the silence of the students is hardly less
ominous than the perversion of the professor."
So wrote John Vyvyan, in his classic study of the
Antivivisection Movement, The Dark Face of
Science. It was a comment on a passage written by
Carl Jung, reminiscing about his days as a medical
student at the University of Basle, in the 1890s.
Jung described the lectures which included vivisection
as "horrible, barbarous, and above all unnecessary",
and thereafter avoided those lectures.
At the Congressional Hearing before a Subcommittee
of the House of Representatives on the subject
of Humane Treatment of Animals Used in
Research, in 1962, several students gave the
following testimony:
"I attended Chicago Medical School last
September. I withdrew of my own accord... One
of the conditions which led to my contempt
towards this school was the cruel treatment which
was given to the experimental animals."
"I am a student studying veterinary medicine.
I was never and am not now in the employ of any
humane society.. .This is a cry and a plea from
a young person still holding on to a few ideals
I have grown up to believe in—and I am beginning
to wonder if there is any real humane
goodness among humans. I am not a sentimentalist,
a crusader, or a fanatic; but I cannot, under
any code or way of life, condone what I, in a few
short years, have seen."
It is almost exactly a century since Jung experienced
his revulsion towards vivisection, and a
generation since these students testified before a
Congressional hearing on the impact of animal experimentation
upon them. In Jung's case and that
of the students, we have the testimonies of collegeage
students, somewhat older that Jeni Graham, exposed
to more advanced vivisection, but the problem
has increased since their time and today
permeates our school system.
Companies that supply animals to classrooms for
profit have rooms filled with every manner of
creeping, crawling, wriggling, strolling, biting,
buzzing, stinging creatures whose internal parts
have been vacuum-packed, freeze-dried, framed,
pickled in alchol or embalming fluid, or embedded
in plastic. (PETA KIDS, Spring, 1988)
Once relegated to college biology classrooms,
medical and veterinary schools, dissection and
forms of animal experimentation on living or dead
animals, now reaches to the high school and junior
high school level. Jeni Graham made her firststand
against dissection in junior high school, when she
was given a calve's brain and a sheep's eyes to
dissect. At that time, her refusal and her request
to do an alternative project was accepted. Several
years later, in 1986, when she was 15 and in high
school, and refused to dissect a frog, she again requested
to do an alternative project. Her request
was refused. The principal of her high school, in
Victorville, a small town in the Mojave desert in
California, 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles,
complained that if he made excuses for Jeni,
students who objected to "gym and to running"
might ask for an alternative to exercise.
Jeni was 15 at the time. Such adult responses
must have struck her as most curious. "He didn't
see the point," she said in an interview. The school
informed Jeni she would have to take a "C" in
biology—her major and a subject in which she is
an "A" student. Refusing to accept this decision,
Jeni's battle to establish her right not to have to
dissect an animal has acquired the classical outline
Roberta Kalechofsky, feminist, animal rights, civil of youth against hardened institutions who are protecting
their institutional turfs. There was, for ex-
rights and peace activist and vegetarian, is a writer,
publisher, educator and lecturer. In 1975 she ample, the snide editorial by Daniel E. Koshland,
founded Micah Publications. Roberta is a Contributing
Editor of ON THE ISSUES.
which qualifies for intellectual silliness, if not
in the prestigious journal, Science, an editorial
for
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