The Animals & Society Institute (ASI) supports our vision of a compassionate world where animals flourish through creating and disseminating evidence-based research that helps scholars, the public, and policy makers understand our relationships with nonhuman animals.

ASI has been instrumental in forwarding the interdisciplinary academic field of Human-Animal Studies (HAS), which sits at the important intersection where human and non-human animals meet. Encompassing broad and diverse perspectives, HAS reaches beyond a sole focus on human conceptions of other animals based upon their importance to human lives, to include their subjective experience and interests. HAS recognizes animals as impactful within co-created multispecies communities, and considers all interspecies relationships at various levels of scale as worthy of discussion. Importantly, although interesting in its own right research supported and generated by ASI also is used to improve animal lives.