CHIAYI CITY — The Taipei Rabbit Welfare Association received a report this afternoon alleging that a teacher at Chiayi City's Chia Hua Senior High School conducted a live dissection of baby rabbits during a biology class, replacing the traditionally controversial frog dissection. Students allegedly documented the event in words and photos and posted them on a blog.
The association condemned the teacher's actions as a "terrible example of life education" and urged the Ministry of Education to launch an investigation. According to Kuo Shou-ting, head of the association's conservation unit, the whistleblower—a rabbit enthusiast and alumnus of the same school—discovered the shocking classroom experiment while browsing his juniors' blogs. Although the class took place about a year and a half ago, in late May of last year, he decided to report it, fearing similar incidents might continue in the future.
In the blog post titled "My First Dissection Experiment (Warning: Graphic Content)", the student wrote that frogs were "too small to handle," so the teacher substituted them with rabbits. The post described how "cute rabbits met their end under our hands wielding cutting tools," resulting in eight rabbit deaths. It vividly detailed the brutality, calling human hands the "murder weapons," with 37 students and one teacher listed as witnesses. One rabbit was reportedly so terrified it urinated in fright.
Kuo said he called the school earlier this evening. The administration initially claimed to have no knowledge of the matter and could not identify the biology teacher involved. When reporters contacted the school the previous evening, the teacher on duty stated that all administrators and faculty had already left for the day and he was unaware of the situation. However, some online users later alleged that the teacher's surname was Tsai and that the same teacher had previously used guinea pigs and other small animals for dissection lessons.
Based on photos submitted with the report, Kuo estimated that the rabbits were between two weeks and one month old, likely purchased from a pet shop. The students involved were believed to be in the third year of senior high school. The Rabbit Welfare Association called on the school to explain whether it had prior knowledge of the teacher's decision and why such an unauthorized change to the curriculum—replacing frog dissections with live rabbit dissections—was permitted. The organization questioned the educational value of such an act and demanded a formal response.
The association also urged the Ministry of Education to establish clear and unified supervision standards for biology lab practices. It noted that frog dissections have already been removed from junior high biology textbooks, and although they remain in the high school curriculum, this case involves a teacher unilaterally "upgrading" the experiment to include a living mammal. The association said it will submit a formal protest to the Ministry of Education and report the matter to the Council of Agriculture and the Chiayi Animal Disease Control Center, as both the teacher and students may have violated Taiwan's Animal Protection Act.
Some classmates reportedly commented that students who loved rabbits were devastated and cried during the experiment, while one female student was seen tearing up midway through the dissection. News of the incident quickly spread online, sparking outrage among netizens who denounced the teacher as "perverted" and called on the public to flood the school and Ministry of Education with protest emails demanding the teacher's removal.
