PIG DISSECTED WITH MOUSE

That wordplay - used in a majority of the headlines - is the only explanation I can come up with for why this story is showing up in more than two dozen papers today. Is the journalistic community at large just now catching up to the concept of virtual dissections? "Morgan Merrick, a vegan who eats no meat, dairy products or eggs, believes it is wrong to dissect frogs and fetal pigs in the name of science." Thanks to previous trailblazing work in this field by Francione and others, there was no big brouhaha over this - "By midday, an alternative was reached. Morgan could perform a virtual fetal pig dissection via the Internet." Not a very dramatic story, maybe, but it stands perhaps as a milestone in how far we've come since the days when objecting to animal dissection was unthinkable.