With all due respoect, you are ignorant of advances in veterinary medicine.
Are they doing better than advances in human medicine?
Human burns are hard enough to treat. What makes it any better for animals? They feel pain and pain killers are limited in what they can do for it. Not to mention that the amount of fur on their skin is going to complicate treatment and recovery and increase risk of infection. Do they not still have to scrub out the burn daily like they do with people, which causes them to scream in pain?
IMO, the only reason not to put down a *being* that has been that badly injured is because the being is human and killing a human is murder. The kitten is still just an animal, regardless of how attached people become to them, and inflicting that much more suffering on it in the name of *saving* it, if that can even be done, is unconscionable, in my book.
All that time and effort could be donated to other worthy veterinary causes.