What bothers biologists is the narrowness of the approach, the haste with which the research must be conducted, and, increasingly, the turning of an animal’s life into numbers. The impersonality of statistics masks both the complexity and the ethics inherent in any wildlife situation. Biologists are anxious about “the tyranny of statistics” and “the ascendency of the [computer] modeler,” about industry’s desire for a “standardized animal,” one that always behaves in predictable ways.
