Applied Animal Behaviour and Animal Welfare MSc postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The water bowl in kennel fourteen was always tipped over by mid-morning. For the first few weeks of my dissertation fieldwork at a greyhound rehoming centre, staff and I treated it as clumsiness. Then I noticed it happened almost exactly when the morning feed trolley started its round two corridors away, and that the same dog, a five-year-old ex-racer, paced the front of his pen for several minutes before and after. That small pattern became one of the more useful parts of my project, and it is a good example of why I want to study applied animal behaviour and welfare at postgraduate level: I have learned to watch carefully, but I want the training to interpret what I see rigorously and to turn it into practical change.

My BSc Zoology dissertation compared how often kennelled greyhounds used three types of enrichment (a lick mat, a scent-scattered blanket and a chew toy) and whether use related to time spent pacing. I observed twelve dogs using scan sampling at five-minute intervals across two-hour sessions, agreeing an ethogram with my supervisor beforehand. The results were modest: the scent blanket was used most, and dogs that engaged with it more tended to pace less, but with twelve animals and no control for length of stay I could not claim the enrichment caused the difference. Writing the limitations section honestly was harder than collecting data, and it made me want proper training in study design and in the statistics needed to handle repeated observations of the same animals.

Reading around the project shaped my thinking. The Five Domains model helped me see that reducing pacing is not the same as improving welfare; a dog can be quieter but not experiencing anything positive. I found Mason and Rushen's edited volume on stereotypic behaviour particularly useful in showing that stereotypies can reflect past rather than present conditions, which complicated how I read the ex-racers' pacing. I would like to explore how welfare assessment can include positive indicators without relying on guesswork about animals' experiences.

Since graduating I have worked early shifts as a bakery assistant in a large supermarket. It is not animal work, but it has taught me things I value: following strict hygiene and timing procedures, noticing when a process is drifting, and explaining to new colleagues why a step matters rather than simply insisting on it. I have trained four new starters on the ovens and proving cabinets, and I have learned that people follow a routine more reliably when they understand its purpose. I expect the same is true of kennel staff, farm workers and pet owners asked to change how they handle animals.

I still walk dogs at the rehoming centre on two afternoons a week. I have no professional authority there, but I record brief notes on how individual dogs respond to new walkers, which staff have found helpful when matching dogs to adopters. Outside this, I play fiddle in a ceilidh band at village halls and weddings, which mostly keeps me sociable and humble about my sight-reading.

I am interested in companion and working animal welfare, particularly how rehoming environments affect animals with long institutional histories, but I want broader grounding in farm and laboratory animal welfare too, because the same questions about measuring experience run across all of them. Postgraduate study would give me the scientific methods, the ethical frameworks and the contact with people working on these problems that my current position cannot. In return I would bring patience with observation, honesty about what data can show, and practical experience of how routines work, or fail, in busy workplaces.