Great, so you agree that there exist classes of neuroscience research and experiments that are “worse” than eating animals, so the fact that animals are eaten in bulk does not give a free pass to all classes of “neuroscience research”?

We actually need to evaluate the “neuroscience research” and processes to determine if it constitutes one of these classes?

If no, please explain how my first example is clearly morally superior to eating an animal.

If yes, then please answer the other two concrete hypotheticals I proposed and evaluate their practical and moral content.

I contend that such practices would be unethical and practically worthless, with the benefits being either practically zero or actively negative from engaging in such research practices. So, eating an animal would be morally superior to such bad research practices. Such practices would, furthermore, be strongly dominated by well-known, standard practices which are more ethical, practically useful, and cheaper; thus harm minimization and utility maximization both support the use of standard, known practices in preference.

I also contend that such deviation from standard practices would only be morally justified if you were intentionally attempting to evaluate the standard practices themselves, but that would require both a specific nuanced argument and would preclude such experiments from testing new innovations to avoid disqualifying confounding variables. As such, the proposed hypotheticals do not fit this criteria as they are attempts to “research” some other non-process factor. So you can only argue this point if you wish to argue that intentionally confounding process and research variables is good science.