Yeah, that sounds right—with a non-broken metabolism, eating lots and lots of tasty food that’s just prepared and sitting there, to your heart’s content, should totally result in about 4 pounds of weight gain, all the way up to 150 pounds.
Do you have any empirical evidence for either of the following?
Farmers were historically wrong to think that free-feeding their animals would tend to fatten them up, OR they didn’t believe it has that effect.
Prior to the more recent novel contaminants, humans are an exception among animals in this general trend, that free-feeding tends to fatten animals up.
Actually I’d ask about the effect of free-feeding non-domesticated animals on ecologically realistic food, rather than free-feeding cows bred to gain weight using grains.
Why “ecologically realistic food”? And which types of realism are you going to pick?
Overfeeding and obesity are common problems in pets, which are mostly not bred to gain weight the way cows are.
My family has kept many kinds of animals. If you give bunny rabbits as much veggies as they want, a large fraction becomes obese. And guinea pigs too. And for their own favorite foods, tropical fish do too. Cats too.
In fact, I have never noticed a species that doesn’t end up with a substantial fraction with obesity, if you go out of your way to prepare the most-compelling food to them, and then give that in limitless amounts. Even lower-quality, not-as-compelling foods free-fed can cause some obesity. Do you even know of any animal species like this?!
If there is large variation in susceptibility (which there would be) to the ostensible environmental contaminant, there should be species that you can free-feed and they don’t get obesity.
I agree that most animals will become overweight if given unlimited tasty food. Two counter examples in my life were a cat and a hamster. Both only became overweight in old age—with unlimited food and many treats. Caveat—the hamster didn’t look fatter than normal hamsters, but maybe all hamsters are fat.
Yeah, that sounds right—with a non-broken metabolism, eating lots and lots of tasty food that’s just prepared and sitting there, to your heart’s content, should totally result in about 4 pounds of weight gain, all the way up to 150 pounds.
That’s how everybody’s metabolisms used to work.
Do you have any empirical evidence for either of the following?
Farmers were historically wrong to think that free-feeding their animals would tend to fatten them up, OR they didn’t believe it has that effect.
Prior to the more recent novel contaminants, humans are an exception among animals in this general trend, that free-feeding tends to fatten animals up.
Actually I’d ask about the effect of free-feeding non-domesticated animals on ecologically realistic food, rather than free-feeding cows bred to gain weight using grains.
Why “ecologically realistic food”? And which types of realism are you going to pick?
Overfeeding and obesity are common problems in pets, which are mostly not bred to gain weight the way cows are.
My family has kept many kinds of animals. If you give bunny rabbits as much veggies as they want, a large fraction becomes obese. And guinea pigs too. And for their own favorite foods, tropical fish do too. Cats too.
In fact, I have never noticed a species that doesn’t end up with a substantial fraction with obesity, if you go out of your way to prepare the most-compelling food to them, and then give that in limitless amounts. Even lower-quality, not-as-compelling foods free-fed can cause some obesity. Do you even know of any animal species like this?!
If there is large variation in susceptibility (which there would be) to the ostensible environmental contaminant, there should be species that you can free-feed and they don’t get obesity.
I agree that most animals will become overweight if given unlimited tasty food. Two counter examples in my life were a cat and a hamster. Both only became overweight in old age—with unlimited food and many treats. Caveat—the hamster didn’t look fatter than normal hamsters, but maybe all hamsters are fat.