Just like your average labrador will inhale food until it's too large to walk. Binging is a natural instinct in feast or famine capable animals.

Working in 'a lab' i.e. laboratory I'm so used to that meaning of the word it took me a few seconds to understand this sentence :P

I assumed it was natural dog / fox/ wolf / canine behaviour. Probably most wild hunters / scavengers?

Either way, dogs are particularly suited to gorging and fasting. And I was under the impression that’s why dogs shouldn’t have free access to food, and why so many pet dogs are overweight.

Do they actually ever come back for more corpses? Or are these, like the article might suggest, actually cases of the fox defending itself from the chicken's ganging up?

There are 4 dogs in my house, one belonging to me and three belonging to my roommate.

Mine won't really overeat unless she's offered a lot of something extremely appealing (like human food). At least 2 of my roommate's dogs will eat until they make themselves sick, though. The last one, I'm not sure.

In the dozens of cats and dogs we've owned over the decades, we've always kept bowls out for them stocked with food.

What I often hear from friends when they discover this is that they'll try to move from their scheduled feeding to free feeding, realize their animal is engorging itself, and then assert "see? doesn't work" or "nope, {cats,dogs} can't do that."