They very much are, many pets will way overfeed themselves if given the opportunity.
Though it might also be human-inflicted, I don't know if wild animals will do so if provided with effortless unlimited amounts of food.
I would expect so though, most evolutionary environments simply don't set up organisms for an unlimited glut of free energy-dense food, when there's a glut of resources it's usually followed by some sort of crash, so organisms stock up as fast as they can in order to out-compete their peers once resources crash. If the glut doesn't end (which is essentially what modern advanced economies arrived at), neither does the tendency to stock up, because there's probably never been an evolutionary context (sustained for a long enough period) where that was an issue and thus allowed some organisms to outlive others.
There are quite a few instances where wild animals have almost unlimited food and reduced predators, in every instance I’ve heard of, they just breed like crazy.
Yes, even if the crash is not an environmental cycle, a crash will generally occur because the glut of resources allows a population explosion which eventually consumes the available resource.
This is one of the hardest systems effects to explain to people every time there is a deer cull; the population doesn't stabilize, it grows until the food runs out and then crashes with vast numbers of deer starving to death.
That a fair number of people still believe that it's more "natural", and thus better, for the bulk of the herd to starve to death rather than a percentage of the herd being hunted is one of the more curious animal rights positions.
> one of the more curious animal rights positions.
It makes sense from the point of view of "stop messing with it for fuck's sake".
Probably doesn't make the situation better one way or the other of course, deer population explosions are largely caused by humans having removed most of the top predators, and being significant stressors for the rest (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/humans-p...). The systems could probably recover if left alone, but that would require isolation (and mayhaps reintroductions) so predators can recover and retake their role, which is unlikely to happen outside of essentially exclusion zones like Pripyat / Chernobyl. Unless they're really unpopular / hard to access, most natural parks might have too much human presence for apex land predators to really be comfortable.
Yeah, I also have that argument all the time ... "the wolves are not coming back to farm country, we need to deal with deer overpopulation since we're the only apex predator left"
Some people are deeply offended by the idea that we are an apex predator.
The unnatural aspect is that we have replaced their natural predators. Perhaps our careful management is sufficient, but there might be unforeseen functions of those predators which we are not fulfilling.
Have you ever owned a cat or dog? My experience is that a percentage of them will overeat unless constantly monitored, eat things that are outright dangerous, etc. What is it that makes humans the stupid ones, here?
This is interesting. Growing up, we had chickens, sheep, goats, cows, horses, dogs, cats and rabbits. And an unfortunate sampling of salamanders, frogs, horny toads, chipmunks, gophers, wild-rabbits, foxes, coyotes, hawks (various types), eagles (a few types), skunks, deer, antelope, raccoons and badgers. (I'm probably missing a few - and I've certainly left out small birds, which require their own reading as do snakes)
Left to their own devices (they weren't each individually heavily supervised - especially when on the range), of the domesticated ones, the only ones that would gorge themselves to death were the horses (when they thought they were getting away with something), with the minor exception of the dogs (who might eat the other animal's grain-based food out of jealousy, and explode their gut because they ate the wrong food because of stupidity)
I did not find that, unmonitored, most animals would eat too much of the wrong type of food for too long (loco-weed for cows might be an exception - but that didn't kill them).
It would be an interesting (if difficult) experiment but from what I know wild animals will absolutely gorge themselves if they can.
The difference is that in the wild, this is tends to be quickly followed by a resource crash from a normal cycle (e.g. winter crash after summer glut) and / or population explosion.
I don't know that any organism has had evolutionary-scale periods over which to psychologically integrate an access to essentially unlimited (in time and quantity both) resources.
Labradors usually have a genetic disorder that causes them to gorge themselves, so they are highly prone to obesity. They are also very popular breeds in the US.
From the introduction: "There are many known risk factors, including blood cholesterol, physical inactivity, age, hypertension, obesity and smoking, but in roughly 15 percent of first-time cardiovascular disease events (CVD) due to atherosclerosis, none of these factors apply."
Or no other animal is smart enough to be able to produce an abundance of food for the scale of population that we can. And also no other animal has capitalism which motivates actors to make the food supply as addictive as possible.
> Or no other animal is smart enough to be able to produce an abundance of food
It's not just the abundance of food, it's the sustained abundance. Many species follow a feast / famine cycle which puts pressure on stocking up as fast as possible during feast in order to survive the inevitable famine. This is the evolved instinctual mechanism which gets shot to piece by the "endless feast" available to many individuals in advanced economies (or wealthy enough individuals in pre-industrial economies), even more so combined with the physical "leisure" (limited requirements of extensive physical activity in day to day life).
Maybe no other animal is just that stupid.