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The implementation of intelligent software to identify and classify objects and individuals in visual fields is a technology of growing importance to operatives in many fields, including wildlife conservation and management. To non-experts, the methods can be abstruse and the results mystifying. Here, in the context of applying cutting edge methods to classify wildlife species from camera-trap data, we shed light on the methods themselves and types of features these methods extract to make efficient identifications and reliable classifications. The current state of the art is to employ convolutional neural networks (CNN) encoded within deep-learning algorithms. We outline these methods and present results obtained in training a CNN to classify 20 African wildlife species with an overall accuracy of 87.5% from a dataset containing 111,467 images. We demonstrate the application of a gradient-weighted class-activation …