Is Animal Testing Immoral?

We live in the age when people are very concerned with morality and ethics in relations between people, between people and nature, and between people and animals. Some people refuse to eat meat or drink milk because it means cruelty and exploitation of animals; some people demand all the livestock to be immediately set free because of the same reasons; however, while demands and ideas of this kind are heard rather often and are said aloud, the idea of animal testing seems to somehow evade the public consciousness. Every day we hear on TV about new medicine being tested on mice and guinea pigs, and tend to accept it quite nonchalantly. But why?

If we consider animals in general to be our friends, why do we consider such behavior to be acceptable? This viewpoint sometimes goes to an extreme – some people consider hunt to be cruel, while animal testing is alright for them. What is the difference, according to them? To my mind, hunt may be cruel, but it, at least, is much more natural than things scientists do with harmless and helpless animals that have done them nothing bad. Natural predators hunt and we see nothing wrong about it; but no animal ever tortures another one just for the sake of seeing what happens next. There is something incredibly unnatural and disgusting about it.

Some people would say that this viewpoint is obscurantist, but how far is experimenting on mice from experimenting on cats and dogs? And experimenting on dogs from experimenting on humans? When we stop treating anything with respect, this attitude tends to spread, taking over things that were considered sacred just a little while ago.