In the article he mentioned a couple times that increased food intake causes the cat to vomit. For a "lazy human" armor plating a robot, cleaning up cat vomit is the last thing he would want to do I imagine.

Quinn is a she, FTR. Also, some cats will eat themselves to obesity (and it tends to be those with this kind of appetite for food, no pun intended), so keeping a limit on their intake is important, particularly if they are house cats (not common in the UK, but I think they are more so in the US).

Especially when your cat's a "puker" that will eat, eat, and eat some more, barf a bunch, and go back to eating.

Also what is with everyone saying "he"? Seriously. That blog is pretty clear about who's writing it.

Some pets might eat themselves to obesity given the chance. I'm not sure the amount of effort the cat puts into trying to get more food is a perfect determinate of how much food the cat needs to be healthy.

Yeah, you need to raise the cat from first weaning with unlimited access to food to prevent this. If they never experience a moment of food anxiety in their lives, most cats will only eat when they are actually hungry.

The majority of cats, however, have a built-in desire to eat whenever food is available, because they have not learned that it will continue to be available in the future. It's really hard to teach them this at any point after early kittenhood.

This is very common for predators as they may go several days between kills. They have to eat when they can as there is no guarantee of when the next meal will be. For that matter, it is not unusual for other animals, including humans. I am certain that an evolutionary drive to eat when food is available is a major factor behind rush obesity rates. We evolved with food shortages.

I think cats that do NOT overeat is the majority. At least among domestic cats.

Mine definitely would, he'd eat until he would throw up and then probably eat some more. We're pretty sure he had food scarcity before he made it to the humane society.

This causes weight gain. My dog gains weight if I walk her any less than I usually do, but still clammors endlessly for food.

I've tried this experiment on myself with much the same results.

> ...still clammors endlessly for food.

This is normal for dogs. They're always "starving".

It depends on the animal. The cats we had when I was growing up always had "unlimited" access to dry cat food and water, and it was only canned stuff we'd put out at specific meal times, and they never ate themselves fat.

That works great until you end up with: https://www.google.com/search?q=tubcat&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&cli...

The author is a female.