Even animals that aren’t eating too much or exercising too little are getting fat. If we can figure out why, we may have the key to our own obesity crisis – and how to stop it.
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Until last year, Borris would never turn down a pork chop. He was partial to ice cream during the summer and loved a Sunday roast in the winter – including beef with Yorkshire pudding, pigs in blankets, mashed potatoes, and a selection of vegetables.
Borris is a five-year-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. By the time his owner, Annemarie Formoy, entered him into the PDSA Pet Fit Club competition, which helps obese cats and dogs slim down, he was 28kg – almost double his recommended weight. It took two people to lift him into the car, he had arthritis in one leg and his breathing was laboured. Thanks to a tailored six-month diet and exercise regime he is now 7kg lighter and has just been crowned joint competition winner with Sadie the Labrador.
Before competing in the PDSA Pet Fit Club contest, Borris was almost double his recommended weight (Credit: PDSA)
Before competing in the PDSA Pet Fit Club contest, Borris was almost double his recommended weight (Credit: PDSA)
Borris, at his heaviest, was not alone. The worldwide prevalence of pet obesity lies between 22% and 44%, and rates seem to be rising. The reasons why are fairly predictable. Owners of overweight dogs feed them more snacks and table scraps, are more likely to have their pets present as they prepare their own meals and are less likely to walk them daily. Owners of obese cats tend to use food as a reward and play with them less. If a dog owner is obese, the chances are their pet will be too (this doesn’t apply to cats).
Obesity also seems to be occurring even in some animals who aren’t being overfed or under-exercised
But obesity also seems to be occurring even in some domestic and wild animals who aren’t being overfed or under-exercised. If these findings are true, something else must be driving obesity and uncovering those could help tackle our own epidemic with the condition.
More than 1.9 billion human adults are overweight. Of these, more than 650 million are obese – that’s about 13% of the world’s adult human population. The worldwide prevalence of obesity has nearly tripled since 1975. And childhood obesity has risen alarmingly too – an estimated 41 million children under the age of five are overweight or obese.
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The first animal clue lies at the paw of the obesity-prone Labrador retriever. “Labradors are consistently the headline act when it comes to overweight dogs,” says Eleanor Raffan, a veterinarian and geneticist at the University of Cambridge. She and fellow researchers discovered that a genetic mutation present in around a quarter of Labradors, was associated with obesity. For each copy of the mutation – which occurred in a gene called POMC – a dog was about 2kg heavier. Most of the animals the researchers studied had one copy of the mutation, but fewer had two.
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