Modern society in its selection of what is acceptable and what is not exceeds all the boundaries of illogicality and inconsequence. It is alright to kill unborn children, who cannot defend themselves or even say their opinion about it, yet it is a dreadful crime for a person to smoke of his or hers free will. It is a good deed to give your money to somebody else and it is immoral to spend it on yourself. There is nothing wrong about conducting dangerous and harmful experiments on animals, but it is evil to hunt them.
The man for some mysterious reason thinks that he has right to do everything he wants with the animals just because he possesses reason and they not; maybe it is true, maybe he just cannot communicate with them, it doesn’t matter. The important thing here is the fact that he considers living beings to be the object and treats them correspondingly, although they still have life of their own, as well as feelings, memory, ability to feel pain, fear and die. It is beyond me, actually, what may be the reasoning behind letting to torture, maim and deprive animals of their normal existence for the sake of anything, be it called scientific progress or mere curiosity.
It is much worse than to simply kill them – actually, killing is the natural part of the natural world and there is nothing metaphysically frightening about it, for animals were doing it for billions of years when the human only appeared. But experimenting on them is something totally new and much worse – there is no immediate destruction, but exactly the deprivation of life. Maybe animals are not capable of understanding what is happening to them – but they can feel that it is something wrong.