Setting conservation objectives often mixes scientific knowledge with political feasibility in such a way that one cannot tell where the science stops and the political pragmatism takes over. For example, Tear found that for endangered species with recovery plans, over a quarter of the plans set quantitative recovery objectives at or below the species' existing population size or number of populations. Most likely these objectives were so low because they were politically palatable. Another possible explanation for such modest recovery objectives is what is known as the shifting-baseline syndrome. In this scenario, successive generations of wildlife managers use as their baseline the conditions they experienced at the start of their careers, resulting in lower expectations with each new generation.