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Session Description: Ecologists aim to answer a variety of questions about animals and the environments that they live in. Oftentimes this research requires intimate interactions with the animals being studied. Understanding the impact of that research on the subjects being investigated is important not only to ensure that we do no harm, but also to know if the act of studying animals is impacting the very behaviours we seek to understand.This course teaches ecologists to frame their studies with a wild animal welfare perspective. Subjects covered will include understanding the impacts that observations might have on behaviour, highlighting good-practices for handling, sampling and tagging, as well as identifying opportunities to use alternatives. Participants will learn the 3Rs principles and how to apply the framework when developing study designs for ecological research.We can all benefit from an improved understanding of the effect of our research on our study subjects. This course will help investigators to determine the options and opportunities to include welfare-related metrics in existing studies, as well as to design studies explicitly aimed at improving methods for the study of wild animals.