My cats are certainly not being wasted. Who else would step across my keyboard when I’m typing?

You should consider yourself lucky to be able to use your cat's keyboard while she is taking her afternoon stroll.

I find this attitude astonishing. My pets are members of my family, and I'd generally rail against experimenting on my family.

Would you let your child participate in a clinical trial if they had a disease for which there was no good treatment? Pets suffer from most of the diseases humans suffer from (cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc) and they also have no good treatment options. We should be using these sick pets in trials to find new cures for pets and humans.

Maybe you weren't clear or I misread you. I understood you to be saying that pets were generally not being used to their potential. (E.g. perfectly healthy pets could be used as research subjects, because they aren't doing anything else valuable at the moment..)

Of course not. No one would think experimenting on healthy pets would be reasonable or ethical, but not using our sick pets to help other pets and humans is a huge waste.