As part of conservation of endangered animal species especially amphibians, the National Biodiversity Congress has sought a ban on using animals covered under the Wildlife Protection Act for study and experimental purposes.
Many species of amphibians, listed as protected in the Wildlife Act, are facing extinction on the global scale due to man-made causes, NBC’s consolidated recommendations’ report said.
“Use of frogs as tools to understand basic concepts in Biology and Pharmacology has been going unabated, in spite of the warnings from the Ministry of Environment and Forest and UGC,” said the report drawn up recently based on the first National Biodiversity Congress held here in November last.
“There is an urgent need to sensitise the teachers against this practice and help conservation of the frog species, by approaching the issue from curricular, pedagogical, ecological, legal and ethical perspectives, and encourage use of digital and simulation alternatives for understanding of the respective academics,” the report said.
Frogs belonging to the genus Rana are included in Schedule IV, which means that these frogs should not be removed from the natural habitats without permission from competent authorities.
University Grants Commission, in recent guidelines to phase out animal dissections from Zoology and Life Science curriculum, has put a blanket ban on using animals covered under Wildlife Protection Act for dissections and experiments by the intervention of Bharatidasan University at Tiruchi in Tamil Nadu.
The university has developed an alternative technology for the purpose to avoid frogs being dissected in college labs.