I have the feeling this has much more to do with our self inflicted lifestyle than genetic factors.
Maybe no other animal is just that stupid.
Maybe no other animal is just that stupid.
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.
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.
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.
Some people are deeply offended by the idea that we are an apex predator.
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?
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.
I suspect the correcting mechanism for that is generally predation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labrador_Retriever#Inherited_d...
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).
And the title is a bit incorrect, other animals do suffer with heart issues/"heart attacks" (usually congenital, but due to old age as well)
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).
But some seem fine with layers of blubber. It's a feature, not a bug sometimes.