Captive Wildlife Care Certificate

Captive wildlife care Courses

AB 201: Animal Behavior 

Are you interested in careers related to studying and caring for wildlife? Husson’s 100% online captive wildlife care certificate will deepen your understanding of captive wildlife management and enhance your credentials in this growing profession. 

In this course, you will study animal behavior through biological and psychological lenses. Deep exploration into the behavior of a species of your choosing complement examples of many species through the coursework. You'll design and conduct an ethogram study on a species informed by factors that impact behavior, types and categories of behavior, applied behavior, and animal emotion and cognition. 

AB 321: Introduction to Wildlife Care and Management 

In this course, you will learn about the care and management of wildlife in captive settings. The course is structured around the theme of animal welfare. Through the course, you’ll gain perspectives on the principles of animal welfare and how these are applied to wildlife management strategies. Each week, you'll explore relevant content, examine contemporary use cases, and apply knowledge to proposing solutions to problems. 

AB 421: Designing Captive Wildlife Experiences 

In this course, you will learn about the design of captive wildlife experiences. The course functions as the capstone for the Captive Wildlife Care Certificate program. Through the course, you’ll gain perspectives on the history and epistemology of habitat design for captive animals. You'll also explore the theories of behavioral enrichment and applied animal cognition. 

Faculty Spotlight

Kaleigh reyes, Ph.d. (c)

Kaleigh Reyes is completing her doctoral degree in Evolutionary Anthropology from the University of Toronto (UofT) where she specializes in primatology with a focus on great ape sleep, cognition, welfare and behavior. At UofT, Reyes serves on multiple university review boards (IACUC & CCAC) on animal ethical conduct in research, contributing expertise on primate and avian welfare. Throughout her doctoral program, Reyes has conducted research on captive apes within various zoos in North America and Switzerland, along with nonprofit ape conservation initiative organizations. Before attending UofT, Reyes conducted her master’s degree at Texas State University where she studied wild chimpanzees and wild Senegal parrots in Senegal, West Africa. Previously, Reyes completed her bachelor’s degree at Indiana University in her home state of Indiana where she had the opportunity to research wild chimpanzees in Uganda, East Africa. Today, Reyes has been within the field of primatology for eleven years and continues to pursue ethical free-choice participation research with the goal to increase the lived experience, health and overall welfare of animals. She centers her work on the cornerstone that the animals in research are collaborators, rather than subjects, in which the research at hand should benefit both parties. Her research interests include ecology, functional morphology, cognition, sleep, diet, and behavior within ornithology and primatology.

Husson University has been approved to participate in the National Council for State Authorization Reciprocity Agreements.