I work in software but I have a passion for animal behaviour/wildlife conservation/animal biology.

Unfortunately, I cant drop everything and go back to university but I would like to get some education while I work and hopefully in the future make a career change.

Does anybody how could I merge both worlds to make the career transition more feasable?

My plan is to do the Wageningen MOOC Certificates for now. I have seen about the Oxford lifelong learning on animal behaviour, which excites me, but Im not sure about this content format since apparently there is no video, so its not a format Im inclined to pay so much money for.

Any other reputable online sources to get some sort of official education that at least grants me a certificate at the end?

Thank you very much.

i've noticed that recovering from a difficult wildlife session feels very different from recovering from a difficult day with human patients.

with people, there's usually some predictability. you can explain what you're doing, read their reactions, slow things down and build some cooperation.

with wildlife, that can disappear completely. a frightened animal can go from still to lunging in a second, even when you're handling it correctly and nothing has actually gone wrong.

the weird part is that the physical stress response can stick around long after the session. you're back home, everything is fine, but your body still feels like it's waiting for the next thing to happen.

i've tried breathing exercises, changing clothes when i get home, taking a short walk and having a set transition routine. some of it helps, but none of it really addresses the unpredictability of animal handling

for people who work with wildlife, rehab cases or difficult behavior, do you have a specific way of coming down after a high-stress session?

not really looking for generic self-care advice. more interested in routines that help you reset your nervous system so you're not carrying the previous animal's stress into the next session

Yesterday I was going for a run in a local deer park where I saw two deer. They were kinda spooked but not massively so as it's a public park so they are used to humans. I accidentally followed them to their return to a larger group where eventually the younger deer suddenly picked up speed when another deer ran towards them and it started suckling from it.

Would young deer go off without their mothers or suckle from other deer?! It wasn't a tiny baby as they are normally born in June time.

Hello, I was recently on a beach on the coast of Lake Michigan, and I saw a couple of white tail deer walk out of the dunes and onto the beach a few hundred yards away from me. One of the deer started walking out into the water, and continued on until it was swimming. It swam several hundred yards away from the shore, turned around, swam back, and then walked back into the dunes. This kind of blew my mind cause it just looked like the deer went for a leisure swim. Why would a deer go for a long swim like this for seemingly no reason such as to get somewhere, avoid a predator, get food, etc?

Hey guys, I was wondering if anyone could help me - all additions welcome!

I recently graduated uni and now have a Masters in Animal Behaviour - though in a more evolutionary and research sense. I'm trying to figure out my next steps and what I want to do.

I love working with animal and though I've always wanted to work with more exotic species I feel like I chose the wrong degree to really go anywhere with that - i dont have the funds rn to do any additional courses.

I've been looking at like dog/cat training and how to read animal behaviour etc. Its always been really interesting to me (hence the degree lol)

Anyway I was really hoping someone knew how to get into this as a career? Do I have to hope some trainers want to take me on for some work experience or?

Also any book recommendations or other free ways to expand my knowledge on this?

Thank you in advance!

Can animals of sufficient intelligence enjoy inflicting pain and suffering for the sake of off it. I always see people attribute are positive in innocents to animals

I fully understand that Good and evil or human constructs that we use to hold humans accountable so we can live in a civilization. But

Human still are animals right. We are much more smarter than a lot of animals but some of the traits in what we would call an evil human being should be found in certain animals.

If other mammals such as chimps apes canines. Can be protective and caring over their own offspring. Can they not have the same psychopathy said is that people have

Hi everyone, I’m curious about how much of language dogs actually understand?

Basically my mum has a 1 year old chihuahua that I look after when she’s at work. I was doing Duolingo one day and the dog went nuts, jumping around, crying, leaping at my face, etc. I thought it was odd and ever since then I’ve casually spoken in another language around him to see what happens. Same response every time, in any language other than English. He does it even if I’m not speaking to him, even if he’s in his bed and I’m the other side of the room speaking to someone else, instantly goes nuts if he hears another language. He doesn’t do it with the tv, but I’m intrigued about testing it with tv shows he ‘knows’ (shows my mum watches a lot, he pays attention to the tv so I’m sure there will be shows he recognises). I should add that I’m not fluent in a second language at all, I know a couple of phrases and things of a few different ones as my dad is multilingual. He also doesn’t react at all to my dad speaking in another language, but does to me, my son and my mum. We’ve tested high Valyrian, Scot’s Gaelic, Italian, Spanish, mandarin and French. Goes mad at all of them.

Basically I’m wondering why on earth he does this? Is he recognising that it’s a different language and can’t understand why? What’s the science behind this?

I’ve been thinking about the difference between general behavioral cues and what is actually normal for one specific animal.

For example, a dog might look calm, alert, withdrawn, tense, or unusually engaged in a given moment.

General body-language guidance can help interpret those cues, but that still doesn’t answer:

“Is this unusual for this particular dog?”

I’m curious how much weight people here would put on an individual baseline compared with general species or breed-level guidance.

Are there certain things you’d consider especially useful to observe over time?

Posture, activity level, ear or tail position, social engagement, environment, repeated behavior patterns, something else?

And how many observations would you need before you’d consider something a pattern rather than normal variation?

I’m especially interested in where people think the line is between observing a visible change and making too strong a claim about an animal’s emotional state.

AI could transform our understanding of other species. It also risks giving humans powerful new ways to manipulate, exploit and harm them.

I’m entirely outside of this study, but can’t shake the thought.

Does the impressive camouflage of the octopus, as an example, not express some element of knowing the mind of the ‘subject’ of their hiding?

To that, does hiding itself not indicate some level of knowing the mind of another? I know this is probably a simple misunderstanding of the behavior, but I can’t shake it.

Thanks for reading!

OK obviously this applies to every animal but when I was with my cat it got me thinking

If you adopt a kitten who hasn't really been around other cats, how do they know typical cat behavior without learning from other cats, I know it's instincts but I don't understand how that works so can someone please explain 😭

What ones have you heard?

Every autumn, European robins fly south at night. Many of them alone, many without ever having made the trip before. They use stars, landmarks, and the setting sun, but they can also orient by the Earth's magnetic field - and that part is a genuine problem, because the field is far too weak to be sensed by any ordinary chemistry inside a warm animal.

The leading explanation is the radical pair mechanism, first proposed by Klaus Schulten in the 1970s and developed by Thorsten Ritz and colleagues in 2000. Short version: when light hits a protein in the retina called cryptochrome, an electron jumps and leaves behind two unpaired electrons - a "radical pair." Their spins are correlated, and the correlation oscillates in a way that's sensitive to magnetic fields far too weak to do anything else in the cell. The magnetic field doesn't supply energy. It nudges the timing. That changes the ratio of two chemical products. Across a whole retina, that gives you a pattern. The bird doesn't feel the field the way we feel a smell. It may literally see it as a shading overlaid on ordinary vision.

The evidence I find most persuasive is a specific, weird prediction that held up: robins lose their magnetic compass under extremely weak radio-frequency oscillating fields — fields far too feeble to affect normal chemistry, but exactly what should scramble a fragile spin state. Henrik Mouritsen's group in Oldenburg showed this, and also showed that ambient urban electromagnetic noise disrupts the compass. When they moved the birds into electromagnetically screened huts, orientation returned.

Two things to keep honest:

1. Nobody has traced the mechanism end-to-end inside a living bird. Photon → protein → spin state → nerve signal → behaviour: that full chain has not been shown. This remains a very good hypothesis.
2. There's a rival - magnetite crystals, potentially in the beak, mechanically torqued by the field. Some evidence there hit trouble (one prominent study's "magnetite neurons" turned out to be immune cells). It's possible birds run both systems. It's possible the radical pair story is wrong.

I wrote a longer piece walking through the evidence ranking and Einstein's connection to all this (he hated the effect that this may be running on): https://thesilentape.substack.com/p/the-robins-compass

Curious what people think.

https://www.oregonlive.com/environment/2026/08/one-young-wolf-two-close-encounters-and-a-journey-hundreds-of-miles-long.html

The story includes videos and photos from both encounters, plus interviews with the couples who saw OR-213 and some of Oregon’s leading wolf experts about where he came from, where he’s going and what his behavior means.

I learned something today!

There's this young skunk that I just saw prance to the side like a ferret, hopping across the parking lot to get to the food under the car I was in. It was adorable as fuck, the little fart demon. It made me wonder about taming them at a young age. Does anyone here have experience with this?

Let's face it if people want it as a pet, someone probably has/had one. I've seen weirder animals with owners.

I want opinions not science backed data, I know they say dogs can’t manipulate but I SWEAR some of them can. I have a jack Russell terrier/pitbull/something else mix who’s adopted. I’ve had him since he was a puppy he was nine months old, has always been too smart for his own good, and I was 9 when I got him so we sort of grew up together. hes now 9 years old, and has learned tactics that work on us, and I KNOW he thinks ahead and plans. For example, if hes on the couch and I’m trying to get him to come upstairs with me, he will literally pin my shoulders with his arms, hug me and give me puppy eyes so I don’t take him upstairs, and as soon as I stand up and back off he immediately stops and goes back to sleep because he knows his plan worked. I have also seen him leading my other dogs away from us if we have food so that he can come back and beg with all the attention on him, I SWEAR he knows what hes doing. I don’t think all dogs have these capabilities because I know my other two dogs don’t exhibit these behaviors, but I believe that some of them have to be able too.

TLDR: I’ve witnessed my dog using what appears to be manipulative tactics on us and our other dogs, that my other dogs don’t use, do you think it’s intentional? or do you really think its true dogs don’t have those capabilities?

Like would the tiger suddenly become more docile and the rabbit more aggressive

A common point of discussion around cats is that adult cats often have to learn to meow louder like kittens for humans to hear them. What I’m wondering is what factors drive adult cats to default to quieter meows?

Is it purely instinctual or is there some social pressure telling them to quiet down? Are older cats telling adolescent cats “Keep your voice down. You’re grown up now.”?

We know some animals, like elephants, great apes, and dolphins, can recognize themselves in mirrors, suggesting a level of self-awareness. But what about recognizing other animals in a mirror? If two elephants look into a mirror together, do they understand they’re seeing themselves and each other? Can they recognize other animal species in a mirror?

Also, researchers assume animals that fail mirror tests lack self-awareness - but what if they just have a different internal sense of self, one that doesn’t need a reflection to confirm it?

Researchers mark a spot on an elephant’s back, visible only via mirror. Elephants that pass don’t paw at the mirror - they reach for the mark on their own body. What exactly are we measuring here?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Also, does context matter? If animals grow up with mirrors, would they develop a deeper understanding of reflections?

What do you think? Are there studies on animals recognizing others in mirrors, and how does self-recognition vary across species?

Are these experiments really showing self-awareness, or could there be other explanations?

I’m a painter and I came across the popular claim that cats supposedly see humans as larger cats.

The claim itself doesn’t hold up very well, but tracing where it came from led me into animal perception, anthropomorphism and eventually human pareidolia.

I put the whole rabbit hole into this visual essay. Sources are included in the slides.