Course summary

Foundation Year courses have been designed for students who do not have the necessary academic qualifications needed to enter directly into the first year of a degree but who have the ability and commitment to do so. Once the Foundation Year has been completed successfully, you can then go on to complete your degree. Explore the fascinating science of animal behaviour, focusing on animals in their natural habitats, including ecological, conservation and welfare contexts. 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 course that develops your fundamental skills and knowledge and then uses them in cutting-edge applied contexts such as conservation and welfare sciences. 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; and farm animal management. Our staff have real enthusiasm for their subject and bring great expertise from their research fields. This course 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 really interesting behaviour in their own right, but are also a crucial part of temperate and tropical ecosystems – understanding their behaviour is vital for wider habitat conservation.