If you care about animal cruelty, the real problems are habitat loss leading the starvation and habitat loss, followed by overhunting/fishing, followed by industrial scale agribusiness where animals are kept in horrible conditions for life, followed by shitty slaughter practices of some small scale farmers, then shitty pet owners, and waaaay down at the bottom is researchers who sometimes treat the animals poorly.

In most countries, there is an ungodly large amount of oversight that goes into animals used in scientific research. The problem is that when the media reports animal testing, they skew the facts in order to make them sound dramatic, when in reality animal well-being is taken very seriously. Lab mice in general live much better lives than your pet mouse.

I didn’t know about this. I think my impressions have mostly come from movies like “planet of apes” so yes, they have been skewed by media.