Explore the fascinating science of animal behaviour, focusing on animals in their natural habitats, including ecological, conservation and welfare contexts.

Course overview

Develop vital employer-desired skills while studying the ever-interesting field of animal behaviour. With an emphasis on free-living, wild animals you will follow a scientifically driven programme of work that develops your fundamental skills and knowledge and then uses them in cutting-edge applied contexts such as conservation and welfare sciences.

Why study this course with us?

A key strength of this course is that it is firmly rooted in the biological sciences and adopts a rigorous scientific approach to the study of the behaviour of animals. As well as exploring the behaviour of charismatic animals, we embrace a wide taxonomic range of species and have a good focus on some of the groups less emphasised elsewhere, such as amphibians and invertebrates.

These groups have interesting behaviour (cockroaches have personalities for example... and frogs can experience stress...) but are also a crucial part of temperate and tropical ecosystems – understanding their behaviour is vital for wider habitat conservation. Whilst the emphasis is mainly on wild animals you can study behaviour in more managed environments: e.g. determining best husbandry and conservation breeding for endangered animals in zoos; best practice pet welfare; farm animal management. Our staff have real enthusiasm for their subject and bring great expertise from their research fields.

In the 2020 NSS, 92% of students agreed that the course provided them with opportunities to bring subject information from different topics, to access and use learning resources, and to provide feedback.

Assessment

Assessment is via exams – MCQs/essays (roughly 50%) – and innovative coursework, including news items, tweets, blogs and mind maps alongside more traditional critiques, scientific reports and essays.

Careers service

The University has an award-winning careers and employability service which provides a variety of employability-enhancing experiences; through the curriculum; through employer contact and through tailored group sessions and individual information, advice and guidance.

Careers and Employability - Student Futures aims to deliver a service which is inclusive, impartial, welcoming, informed and tailored to your personal goals and aspirations, to enable you to develop as an individual and contribute to the business and community in which you will live and work.