The ethical stance on animal experiments

The Australian philosopher Peter Singer is the author of the book Animal Liberation, which I translated into Italian with the title Liberazione Animale and was published by Mondadori, one of the major publishing companies in Italy. The book, in both languages, has given rise to an international movement. Singer goes to the crux of fundamental central ethical questions. The central moral question, when we talk about humans using animals for medico-scientific experiments or in machinised farming conditions and slaughter for human food, is not "can non-human animals think or can they talk?" but "can they suffer?" The answer is obviously yes. Human beings will also benefit from the end of medical-pharmaceutical experiments on animals, due to the species differences which lead the experimenters to apply to humans results obtained from other species who have different anatomy and physiology from us and as a consequence it is extremely risky to deduce that some practice or substance innocuous for other animals will have the same effect on humans. As I have explained in my post published here just before this one, the consequences can be and often are disastrous for humans, as many famous cases, like that of the drug Thalidomide and numerous others, have demonstrated. Ethics and science on this subject lead to the same conclusion.