The eighties involved a decade of debate between the cognitive school of psychology and the sociobiologists of the biological sciences dealing with the parameters of the structure of animal behavior. The sociobiologists have been showing the evolutionary effects of nature on behavior and the cognitive school of psychology has shown the nurturing aspects of environment. In the nineties, a new approach to animal behavior is being made by the cognitive ethologists with a school of though initiated by Donald Griffin in the late seventies. Cognitive ethology is the study of behavior in contexts closely approximating the natural environment. This approach is basically a compromise between the psychologists and the biologists regarding the study of animal behavior.
Ethology is a discipline of zoology, which is one of the biological sciences.
Cognitive ethology is a merging of psychology, through cognitive studies, and the biological sciences, through ethology, into a theory producing area of research. One interesting result of the study of cognitive ethology is that the concepts of animal thought and mind have been revived to explain how animals could possibly process environmental and social information. The point of this short history of the study of animal behavior is that a visit to the original Navy research studying dolphin mental abilities casts a light on the Navy's dolphin program. But for interpretive purposes the light needs to be placed in an appropriate context. This light is bright enough that the very motive to classify the program in 1967 is now one question of this paper.