Dogs really are like their owners; at least, in that they’re getting bigger around the belly region.
And, as with humans, it’s causing all sorts of problems for their hearts and joints that are straining under excess weight of our very good bois, but it might provide humankind and science with the fatortunity we’ve been looking for.
See, humans have been getting fatter and fatter in recent decades for reasons which can’t be put down to bad diets or inadequate exercise, and no-one’s entirely certain as to why that is.
As with humans sometimes it can be put down to inadequate activity and overfeeding, but in a lot of cases those can be ruled out. What’s more, even some wild animals are starting to show signs of obesity which is just plain terrifying.
And domestic animals are easier to study than humans, not least because they don’t lie about that late-night ice cream binge and how often they go to the gym, and those studies have found the first signs of a possible genetic mutation affecting appetite in labradors.
In case you were wondering, it’s a deficiency in pro-opiomelanocortin. You know, just like you suspected.
On top of that there’s some evidence that antibiotics used in factory farming might have made subtle changes to gut bacteria. So if you’re eating those things, maybe it’s teaching your tum-tum similar lessons.
There’s also some evidence that these changes in wild animals like marmots has been in response to climate change, so there’s another thing you can be terrified about for future generations: along with everything else, maybe we and our animals mutating to get fatter against environmental apocalypse.
In short: the way animals are also gaining weight is showing promising-slash-deeply-depressing new lines of research. On the plus side, we might be able to stop us all getting inadvertently porky.
Especially our good bois.