Humanimal Trust seeks to educate people about One Medicine and create a world where all humans and animals benefit equally from medical progress and ultimately not at the expense of an animal’s life.
Humanimal Trust champions the potential benefit of the funding of collaborative studies treating naturally-occurring disease in humans and animals at the same time. For example, this might involve setting up an ethically well-designed clinical trial of a promising treatment in dogs who have prostate or bone cancer which could pave the way for a human clinical trial, rather than injecting a healthy animal with the cancer in order to test a novel therapy for diseased human patients.
Humanimal Trust also advocates for reciprocity between human and animal medicine, so that medical advances for human patients are available equitably and at the same time for animal patients affected by the same diseases. For example, if a treatment for prostate or bone cancer is developed in an animal, animals affected by these cancers should have immediate access to this treatment alongside humans. Currently, this is not the case for most drugs or implants because it costs money to licence the drugs for use in animal patients, even if that same species has been injected with cancer for the experiment that gave rise to the human treatment in the first place.
We believe that the concept of One Medicine will, jointly with non-animal alternatives, reduce the dependency on experimental animal testing until it can become obsolete. Where the use of experimental animal models is mandated by current regulations, such research must adhere strictly to the principles of replacement, reduction and refinement.
Humanimal Trust will not fund research that takes an animal's life through experiments. However, collaborating with other organisations and beginning to work to evoke change from within the system, is the only sensible option in the current regulatory and governance environment.
We advocate significant investment in the use of alternatives to animal testing and the sharing of knowledge between human and veterinary medicine.
We believe One Medicine can save time, money and ultimately, lives.
The World We Want to See in the Future…
- Human and animal health have demonstrably improved as a result of One Medicine.
- One Medicine is widely understood and embraced.
- Collaboration between human and animal medicine is the norm.
- There is sufficient funding and robust public policy to support collaboration between human and animal medicine.
- There is no scientific need and no legal requirement for laboratory animal testing.
If you agree and want to help us to make animal testing obsolete by supporting its replacement, reduction and refinement through collaboration and reciprocity, you can add your voice to the growing global community calling for sustainable and equal medical progress - but not at the expense of an animal's life.
Sign the Humanimal Pledge for One Medicine today.