I was asked to explain why and how a Dutchman got to be a professor teaching animal behaviour in a French university. Someone must have thought that my story could provide some guidance for aspiring ethologists and behavioural ecologists. I am not so sure that my career path is one that should be followed, but perhaps someone can learn from my mistakes. I think I can now afford to write about them without much of a negative effect on my career. Not that I have bothered much about my ‘career’, but that is perhaps the core of my problem. I have never been good at preparing myself for the future, so after treading the mills of the Dutch educational system I found myself regularly confronted with steps in life that I should have prepared, if not better, then at least earlier. And so I ended up in a ‘cul de sac’. But let me start from the beginning.

I can't tell you what kind of ‘—ist’ I am exactly at this point – primatologist, behavioural ecologist or evolutionary psychologist – but I went to the university to become an ethologist. The reason was simple: I liked animals a lot, and notably the furry ones. I definitely preferred seeing them alive, healthy and doing their own thing. I understood from books by the likes of Tinbergen, Lorenz, Wickler and Eibl-Eibesfeldt that ethologists did professionally what I liked to do anyway: watch animals behave.