When putting together encounter histories for Known-fate modeling, why does it result in bias if you record an animal as alive during an interval when it was missing but it must have been alive because you found it at a later date?
I have read and re-read Chapter 16 and section 16.7 on censoring in the MARK book, including the explanation that "The reason for this bias is because a dead animal is less likely to be encountered at a later occasion than if it lives. So, you have a biased sampling process – animals are mostly encountered because they are alive, and hence estimates of survival become too high if the ‘00’ values are replaced with ‘10’." I don't really understand this explanation and would appreciate it if someone could give me more information.
I am largely concerned about this because I would like to estimate survival from a dataset wherein a few telemetered animals were missing during an entire weekly interval, were located during the following weekly interval alive, and then were found dead during that same second interval (animals were tracked thrice weekly). From what I understand of Chapter 16, because these animals were missing/censored at the end of the first interval, I should therefore censor both intervals even though I know the exact interval in which the animal died. I am worried that censoring deaths from my dataset (which is relatively small) could lead to worse bias than including at least the death intervals, if not the earlier ones in which the animals were missing but must have been alive.
Additionally, this work is done at a military base where one of the primary reasons that the animals occasionally go missing is simply because the team could not access the areas on a given week because of military operations that barred them access. So, it seems very odd to me to have to censor these intervals when I am almost 100% certain that these animals would have been located if we could have looked and when they were found again at later dates.
Any advice on how I should handle my encounter histories formatting with respect to censoring would be much appreciated!