Grinning ear to ear Mrs. Scott announced to the class that they would be starting the mink dissection lab. “There is no better way to view the muscles then to dissect them!”  Mrs. Scott said with a smirk.

The room was pungent with the smell of formaldehyde so strong it made you cringe. After taking a deep breath directly over the cold, lifeless animal your eyes start to water. The looks of fascination and disgust swept over the students faces as they arrived at their lab stations to see the small animal. Mrs. Scott told a favorite story of this lab,

“A few years ago one of my students accidently hit the stink sack in the mink and two of my other students puked,” Scott said.

Throughout the room you could hear the squeals and giggles of Mrs. Scott’s students as they carefully peeled apart the animal hoping to avoid that strange sack that contained an unbearable stench.

“The really gross part is the eye,” junior, Chloe Peach said while cutting through the tissue above the mink’s eye.

Mrs. Scott crossed the room and visited each group to have a look at what they had discovered. Earlier in the week they had injected a blue die into the mink’s heart which gave the whole body a blue tint. You could see all the veins and arteries throughout the body. Some of the students began naming their Mink prior to the lab.

“I really enjoyed creating a relationship with it before we dissected it,” junior Ginette Smith said.

Seeing all the smiling, happy faces around the class made it obvious that this was a favorite lab for all the students in Mrs. Scott’s anatomy classes.