The usual anthropocentric approach, which focuses only on progress and sanctifies development, loaded with capitalist concerns, is rapidly consuming the natural resources of the earth, without considering its boundaries and sustainable future. As a result of these anthropocentric tendencies, the balance of nature has been disrupted for centuries by various environmental massacres. The consequences of the environmental crisis, as a global problem, seriously threaten the sustainable future of nature. Therefore, it has become a necessity for humanity to act with environmental awareness. In this context, ecocriticism aims to create a strong consciousness about the sustainable future of the earth through literature. It adopts a planet-centered approach by simply establishing a connection between literature and ecology. Ecological poetry criticism, as one of the sub-fields of ecocriticism, briefly focuses on the attention a poet has to other non-human elements of nature, namely animal, plant communities and inanimate beings, in her/his poems. In this context, Oktay Rifat (1914-1988), as one of the prominent poets of the twentieth century modern Turkish poetry, advances his intuitive attention to nature in a profound structure in his poems. Observes the dynamics of natural balance. From his first poems, he internalizes the fact that everything is connected to everything else in the holistic structure of nature as an ecological knowledge. In his poems, there are also different perspectives that break anthropocentric conventions and enable deep questioning within the scope of nature and human relationship and interaction. The poet observes the behavior of animals in the ecosystem, establishes an interactive bond with the animals and tries to think like them. Based on the assumption that animals have inner worlds, he even makes some emotional predictions about them. He poetizes each animal species with its inherent values, different from the usual anthropocentric tendencies. The aim of this article is to read, in Oktay Rifat's poems, the behaviors of animals that reinforce their adaptation to life according to their evolutionary processes and their efforts to survive, together with their cognitive activities, around the categories of movement-speed and emotion-communication-thought. It is seen that the animal behaviors in Oktay Rifat's poems produce considerable value in the formation and development of environmental awareness and ethics.The behaviors of animals that reinforce their adaptation to life and their efforts to survive according to their evolutionary processes will be read together with their cognitive activities around the categories of movement-speed, emotion-communication-thought.