The traditional monitoring of forest musk deer behavior primarily relies on direct human observation or the post hoc playback analysis of ordinary surveillance videos. This approach is not only time-consuming and labor-intensive but also highly subjective, easily leading to missing or misjudged critical behavioral information. Moreover, it is difficult to achieve real-time monitoring and anomaly warning. These limitations severely constrain the efficiency of the large-scale artificial breeding of forest musk deer and the effective advancement of wild population conservation. Thus, this study proposes a forest musk deer behavioral recognition method based on an improved YOLOv8-Pose. A forest musk deer behavior image dataset covering four typical behaviors was constructed, and 18 keypoints were systematically annotated. This study designs a Dilated Spatial Pyramid Pooling-Fast (DILATED-SPPF) module and a Multi-scale Depthwise Separable Context Mixer (MDSC-Mixer) module, and integrates them into YOLOv8-Pose. Experimental results show that the improved model outperforms the original YOLOv8-Pose and comparison models such as YOLOv11/v12-Pose on key metrics of object detection (Box-mAP50 0.929, Box-mAP50-95 0.814) and pose estimation (Pose-mAP50 0.879, Pose-mAP50-95 0.565). This study further develops a visual interactive interface that intuitively presents detection results and skeleton structures. This work provides a high-precision, low-cost automated behavior analysis tool for the artificial breeding and wild conservation of forest musk deer with significant application value for enhancing the intelligence level of endangered species protection.