Thanks for the reading recommendations, that stuff sounds fascinating, and I'll admit that my reference to RCTs was perhaps an overly mean dig at overcorrection for methodological rigor, a tic I likely developed from my exposure to the pharmacological research world, which is in practice greatly stymied by hidebound institutional policies about what hypotheses can be considered and what experimental framings are considered evidence at all. Probably not an appropriate thing to apply to ethology, which I know a lot less about