To reach its potential wildlife management needs a coherent purpose. Traditional divisions between science, society, and nature, however, create conflicts between responsibility to science, the public, and nature. These divisions emerged as early as Plato’s (400 BC) allegory of the cave. In Plato’s allegory human society existed inside a cave formed by its own delusions, and a philosopher or sc...

Despite their wide use in scientific journals such as The Journal of Wildlife Management, statistical hypothesis tests add very little value to the products of research. Indeed, they frequently confuse the interprettation of data. This paper describes how statistical hypothesis tests are often viewed, and then contrasts that interpretation with the correct one. I discuss the arbitrariness of P-...

I hypothesized that statistical ritual has supplanted knowledge accrual as the sine qua non of wildlife science. Under the hypothesis, I deduced occurrence of 1) significance testing of the obvious and inconsequential, 2) quantitative debasement of research problems, and 3) publication of papers that largely lacked information but were methodologically impeccable. Articles in past and recent wi...

Decisions affecting wildlife management and conservation policy of imperiled species are often aided by population models. Reliable population models require accurate estimates of vital rates and an understanding of how vital rates vary geographically. The eastern massasauga (Sistrurus catenatus catenatus) is a rattlesnake species found in the Great Lakes region of North America. Populations of...

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a statistical innovation methodology that allows researchers to fit far more complex models to data than is feasible using conventional methods. Despite its widespread use in a variety of scientific fields, MCMC appears to be underutilized in wildlife applications. This may be due to a misconception that MCMC requires the adoption of a subjective Bayesian anal...

Society faces a growing challenge in the management of zoonotic wildlife diseases. Unique attributes of zoonotic diseases and the shifting sociocultural contexts within which diseases are experienced create serious challenges for managers. We address 2 critical questions: how do uncertainty and severity associated with a zoonotic disease relate to public management attitudes and preferences, an...