In the movie The Twelve Monkeys, why is animal testing so significant in relationship to the mental patients?

I don't feel like there was much purposeful defense of animal rights going on, from the perspective of the writers or Terry Gilliam.

Some of the characters were fixated on animal rights as an issue, but they were just random nut jobs themselves, and their cause turned out to have no relation to the actual story, other than as a red herring.

I guess you could say they probably empathized with the animals, having in common with them that they too were in the control of medical institutions, and a society as a whole, which they could not understand and in which they had no meaningful role to play.

Or in other words, as deranged humans they were basically just animals themselves. As all humans actually are, in fact, minus intelligence.

I don't see morals entering much into the story either. The world is destroyed, irrevocably. Intelligence fails, there is no rationalized morality to proclaim about. The animals take over.

Yeah, they suffered a lot, so did a lot of people, and that is all perfectly natural. That's what I think the movie is about. The insufficiency of human intelligence to control the events it brought about, and the inevitability with which nature resolves things, with no controlling intelligence, and no need for it.

I believe as an analogy, a parallel to the humans. Look they are testing animals. Look humans too.

Mental ward = humans treated like animals. Quite true, really.

Because you have to be a mental patient to think animals have rights.