Human Animal Interaction
Engaging the public health community: Exploring relationships between pets and people at the American Public Health Association (APHA) 2025 meeting
Last month at APHA, Dr Vanessa Ashall, human-animal interaction (HAI) Technical Leader at Waltham Petcare Science Institute, presented research on the impacts of relationships with cats and dogs on human mental health and wellbeing.
Here, she reflects on her three days at the conference, including her learnings, and how the Pets and Wellbeing Study (PAWS) program could help to redefine One Health.
Every year, thousands of the world’s public health professionals, researchers and policymakers gather at APHA. Over three days, they tackle the most pressing health challenges that are affecting humans today.
Along with four other human-animal interaction researchers, including one of our PAWS academic collaborators, I was there to talk to this year’s theme of ‘Making the Public’s Health a National Priority’. Together, we highlighted the important role that pets can play in human health and wellbeing (and vice versa).
Our 90-minute session, ‘Humans' Best Friends: Pets and Mental Health’, was the first of its kind for APHA, indicating a growing interest in this research area.
The session was incredibly well attended, with audience members representing public health research, policy and practice.
Over five presentations, we covered topics including the role of dog interactions for teenagers with social anxiety, dog ownership as a moderator of stress, and disability and One Health.
In my own presentation, ‘Caring for the self through caring for pets: A relational One Health study of rest and relaxation, sleep, and daily stress management’, I shared our latest PAWS research, including:
The importance of this study, which felt particularly poignant while talking to cross-industry healthcare experts. I described the contemporary significance of mental health as a global health priority, and the importance of understanding the potential role of the 1 billion global population of pets.
The study’s design, which was qualitative, involving 31 in-depth online interviews with dog and cat owners across 11 countries.
Our findings, which showed that caring for companion animals can provide a sense of permission for, and raise the priority of, rest and relaxation. We also discovered that this is dependent on mutual – rather than individual – enjoyment.
I closed by highlighting the practical implications of this work, identifying pets as an invisible resource in mental health, which may be activated through everyday moments of multispecies leisure. How we might design future public health research to better capture the role of pets struck a particular chord with the audience.
As I shared our findings with human public health professionals, I was struck by how collaboration across disciplines mirror the mutually beneficial relationships I described between pets and their owners.
As our research continues to highlight the significance of the bidirectional relationships between animals and humans, it’s important we carry on sharing our learnings with professionals across the human health space.
During my three days at the conference, I learned that public health has a longstanding interest in One Health research, but that this is often restricted to a consideration of the transmission of disease between humans and animals.
This year, I was proud to be part of a growing research community exploring how health and positive wellbeing can also be transmitted between species.
I left Washington feeling excited about the future of public health research and the space which exists for the growth of relational One Health research, for uncovering the role our relationships with pets can play in mutual health and wellbeing. I’m looking forward to sharing my learnings with our team, partners, collaborators, and the wider HAI community.
The Pets And Wellbeing Study (PAWS) program is set to become the world’s largest, multi-year research program, exploring the impacts of relationships with cats and dogs on human mental health and wellbeing. Look out for more research updates in the coming months on our PAWS website or on LinkedIn
