As you read this, one of Australia's great international success stories, Cochlear, is testing a version of its famous "bionic ear" on 16 cats for which the company has paid almost $450,000 to be deafened.

When I received a copy of the confidential "project agreement" between Cochlear and the Bionics Institute to enact this fate upon the animals, I was unsure what to think - medical research has long forced animals to be proxies for people in what many would argue is essential work to lessen human suffering. 

This is what Cochlear does:

Could you deny a child this? Would you buy a product that intentionally maimed animals to achieve this?

In a bid to understand better what Cochlear hoped to achieve through its research, I contacted the company about the $449,696 contract with Victoria's Bionics Institute to deafen and implant the cats.

I was directed to Cochlear's corporate affairs manager who would say only "we conform to the necessary processes" and that this "is not an area we provide commentary on".

Later attempts met with a similar response, as did repeated approaches to the researchers and director of the Bionics Institute. 

Make no mistake, the Bionics Institute cannot just cut open cats when it likes. Whatever research it has proposed must first pass through the institute's Animal Research Ethics Committee, whose spokesperson also declined to comment. 

This is not a Mickey Mouse rubber stamp. The people on these committees take their jobs very seriously.

Cochlear and the Bionics Institute no doubt think they will not be given a fair hearing in the court of public opinion.

This is an emotional topic. However, with no comment from either, we're left with the unadorned documentation of what will be done to the 16 cats. It outlines one of the two purposes of the current "project" as being to "determine the effects of an amplified acoustic environment on loss of residual hearing in cats that have a cochlear implant and receive chronic electrical stimulation". 

This involves lead wires "tied with Dacron mesh to the skull through two holes" and a stimulator attached "subcutaneous on the back near the spine".

Human "operators" are warned in the documentation "to maintain at least one metre distance" from the "operating device ... because of the quite strong magnetic field generated by the coils".

All in all, this doesn't sound like a lot of fun for the cats, although, without any kind of professional clarification, we are left to ponder the levels of discomfort and/or torment experienced by the animals and just how testing on cats tells researchers anything about the anatomy of humans.

One British expert I approached through Humane Research Australia, Dr Andre Menache, told me: "As a veterinary surgeon for 30 years I challenge the researchers responsible for this study to provide one shred of evidence these cat experiments are predictive of what happens in people with hearing problems.

The fact these researchers make the claims they do in their published work indicates that they need to undergo a basic course in evolutionary biology."

Organisations representing the deaf in Australia also expressed surprise at Cochlear's use of animal testing, with one spokesperson saying: "I don't imagine this is well known. I've never heard or seen discussion of testing on cats or any other animals on social media. It troubles me to hear that.

"You need to understand, however, getting an implant of this nature is always a difficult decision for people to make, as there is a risk they may lose what little hearing they have through implantation, so I imagine they would want to know some kind of testing had been done."

This may well be the case, but a spokesperson for the Sydney Cochlear Implant Centre (SCIC) - "Australia's largest cochlear implant program" - told me: "I can say quite categorically, I have never heard of this [animal testing]."

Likewise, a spokesperson for Deaf Australia said she was "a little concerned about the methods used to test something that is by no means a cure for deafness". 

Reactions such as this suggest animal testing is not something Cochlear wants associated with its brand, while being quite willing to benefit commercially from its use under the shroud of academic secrecy.

Cochlear is not a charity: In February this year, the ASX-listed company announced a 240 per cent rise in its first-half profits to $71.4 million. It is a big business and it does not just give away its implants; they cost in the range of $25,000-$30,000 and we, the Australian public pay for them via Medicare. 

The experiences of the live cattle, factory farm and greyhound racing industries in Australia clearly illustrate that Australians have little tolerance for animal cruelty, so it's small wonder that Cochlear wants nothing to do with videos such as the one below.

While this footage is not of Cochlear's cats, the animal above was being used for auditory experiments in the US, similar to those being conducted at the Bionics Institute on behalf of Cochlear. The operations this cat was subjected to are also similar to those illustrated and described in Cochlear and the Bionic's Institute's "project agreement".

Without information about why and how Cochlear uses its animals, Australians can only be left to wonder and compare YouTube videos. 

Child's joy versus animal's torment.

Most would pick the child.

However, to get there, you must embrace a utilitarian view of the world - the greatest good for the greatest number - one in which the supposed "lesser consciousness" of animals deems them vulnerable to whatever we humans of "higher consciousness" decide will benefit us.

As Australian ethicist Peter SInger has pointed out, though, this argument falls apart when you ask people to replace the "lesser consciousness" of animals with the "lesser consciousness" of a severely handicapped or infant human; we'd never allow the sort of medical experiments conducted on so-called "dumb" animals to be done to these two "dumb" groups of humans.

The fact is, without information, we cannot have an informed debate about Cochlear's processes and it is this lack of transparency that groups such as Humane Research Australia have campaigned against for years.

Australia is the world's fourth largest user of animals in experiments, after the US, China and Japan, yet unlike the European Union, where researchers are required by law to publish, "non-technical summaries", explaining how and why the animals were used and what benefits resulted, Australian researchers work in secrecy.

In the history of rights movements, it has always been information that has led the change in attitudes; the printing press, pamphlets, books, then film, television and YouTube have let generations of people walk in others' shoes.

As the Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker writes in The Better Angels of Our Nature: "A connected and educated populace, at least in aggregate and over the long run, is bound to be disabused of poisonous beliefs, such as that members of other races and ethnicities are innately avaricious or perfidious; that economic and military misfortunes are caused by the treachery of ethnic minorities; that women don't mind being raped; that children must be beaten to be socialised; that people choose to be homosexual as part of a morally degenerate lifestyle; that animals are incapable of feeling pain".

Without that information, however, we might as well be blind, dumb and deaf. 

SMH