Laboratory animal experimentation functions as confession to shore up scientific certainty.

Evidence

What did the torturers of the Inquisition want? The admission of evil, of the principle of evil. It was necessary to make the accused say that he was not guilty except by accident, through the incidence of the principle of Evil in the divine order. Thus confession restored a reassuring causality, and torture, and the extermination of evil through torture, were nothing but the triumphal coronation (neither sadistic nor expiatory) of the fact of having produced Evil as cause. Otherwise, the least heresy would have rendered all of divine creation suspect. In the same way, when we use and abuse animals in laboratories, in rockets, with experimental ferocity in the name of science, what confession are we seeking to extort from them from beneath the scalpel and the electrodes? … Precisely the admission of a principle of objectivity of which science is never certain, of which it secretly despairs. Animals must be made to say that they are not animals, that bestiality, savagery - with what these terms imply of unintelligibility, radical strangeness to reason - do not exist, but on the contrary the most bestial behaviors, the most singular, the most abnormal are resolved in science, in physiological mechanisms, in cerebral connections, etc. Bestiality, and its principle of uncertainty, must be killed in animals. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 414

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The Inquisition-to-laboratory analogy reframes animal testing not as scientific method but as ritual confession — a genuinely paradigm-shifting reframe of a familiar practice.
• XREF: Directly builds on the book’s own core thesis of the precession of simulacra: the animal must testify to a causality/objectivity that is itself a simulation of order.