Rats can bop their heads to the beat

I work at a place that has to do animal tests (mostly on mice and fish) to understand and cure diseases.

Colleagues working with animals tell me there's strict restrictions on conducting these tests, everything has to conform to animal protection laws and ethics requirements. If tests aren't deemed necessary, they won't be conducted.

This makes me wonder about the necessity and suffering/benefit ratio of "surgically plac[ing wireless accelerometers] on the rats", especially since the image processing already seems to provide insight.

Ever since I came across the post about how sheep rotate leaders in a herd, I’ve become befuddled with the parts of the scientific community who conduct these kind studies. How is something like this planned, proposed, funded, re-planned, etc. and for what cause?