ABSTRACT
Ethology is not a theory, and as a field of study it overlaps with many other disciplines. But the term ‘ethology’ is applied particularly to the work of students of behaviour, and especially animal behaviour, who share certain orienting attitudes to their research. They feel, for instance, that the description and classification of behaviour is a necessary preliminary to its analysis, that the behaviour of a species cannot be properly understood without some knowledge of the environment to which it has become adapted in evolution, and that questions about the function and evolution of behaviour are as valid and
important as those about its immediate causation (Tinbergen 1963).
