Zoobiquity

I would like to read this book - it looks very interesting! Zoobiquity: What animals can teach us about health and the science of healing

It seems like more insights about animal (and human) behavior can be gleaned from anecdote-based inductive reasoning than the traditional scientific method.  Most animals seem way too complex to perform truly controlled experiments on.

For example, see Wikipedia: Pit of Despair and Harry Harlow on Love.  (A warning that this second link is hard to read and very sad, but thought-provoking.  The monkey in Figure 1 will haunt my thoughts and heart forever).

If isolating animals alters their behavior, and interactions with other animals alter behavior in hard-to-predict ways, then doesn't it make more sense to account for these variations when coming out with conclusions, rather than (futilely) attempting to eliminate them?