Featured Partner
Principal Investigator
Rationale
The human-animal bond offers significant health benefits for both companion animals and humans.
Objective
Researchers aim to gain a better understanding of the human-animal bond and its effect on companion animal and human health and wellbeing by applying artificial intelligence approaches to acquired HABRI questionnaire data as well as data from other studies on humans.
Hypothesis
With the planned work, we will gain a better understanding of the human-animal bond and its relationship with companion animal and human health. The availability of complementary data to HABRI (ALSPAC, ELSA, UK Biobank), which will be scoped as part of the current project, will allow in the future for the analyses described above to incorporate and control for additional human health outcome and wellness information leading to a means of confirming correlation between health, wellness, specific diseases and mental health status in humans with companion animal guardianship or “cohabitation”.
Design
First, using a range of computational techniques, researchers will investigate which parameters (characteristics of pet parents, animal welfare, quality of life, and veterinary care) are most associated with the different levels of the human-animal bond. Next, researchers will use methods in machine learning to identify different subgroups or “types” of pet parents, based on their characteristics, and relate those subgroups to animal health outcomes and the human-animal bond. Finally, researchers will design the HABRI questionnaire to be deployed as part of the UK-Biobank, a 500,000 person study on health and wellbeing, and scope the potential in additional datasets, to enhance our understanding of the human-animal bond and its relationship with human health.
Expected Results
Important to this project is the drive to release all findings from this study as soon as possible after appropriate statistical tests and verification. Information derived will be disseminated and can inform the wider population on the benefits of the human animal bond. The work will develop a fuller understanding of the benefits of human-animal interactions and the One Health approach, and this will be used to inform policy makers at a time when companion animal ownership is sometimes questioned, in part with respect to resources used on companion animals and ramifications on sustainability. Use of other cohorts for validation will strengthen the findings, and thus conclusions.
Researchers also plan to internationalise this research and findings by reaching out to other bodies involved in epidemiological research to discuss further questionnaire-based assessment of the human animal bond. When HABRI questionnaire (which will be adapted and deployed as part of the current project) responses return from the UK Biobank, researchers will apply for additional funding to analyse these novel data for validation of results (from the current study) and for further insights.
