What would happen if we ate like wild animals?

You've gotten some interesting answers, OP. However, I have to admit that my first thought was isn't this just Fat Tuesday followed by Orthodox Lent? No yeast, no sugar, no dairy, no meat, no alcohol from Ash Wednesday until Easter, with a couple of total fasting days along the way. Use it up on Tuesday and that's that.

That's not eating like a wild animal, but it is pretty close to your experiment. I do Fat Tuesday (use up whatever I am giving up and put away the alcohol) followed by a 24 hour Ash Wednesday fast every year. We had Orthodox neighbors who gave up everything.

estherdragonbat wrote: »

When I started feeding the feral cats in my backyard, they'd wolf it down. As they got used to the idea that it was ALWAYS going to be there in the morning, and that if it was finished, there'd often be more later in the day, they relaxed a bit. The most aggressive one stopped attacking any other cat that tried to get to the dish before he was finished. They started leaving over some for later in the day. And occasionally, if they didn't like a new treat, they'd actually... nudge it out of the bowl and ignore it. THAT was when I knew they weren't starving anymore!

(P.S. For the record, I've got three cats coming round, all of whom have been TNR'd before I ever met them.)

I HEART you for taking care of feral cats!

I moved into a neighborhood where 60 cats were living on the elementary school grounds and none were fixed.... My husband and I got the humane society (local, not national) to help us get them TNRed. We used online ads and found homes for about 25 tame cats and kittens. We had to euthanize the really ill ones. Then we put some of them back. After years of feeding them at the school and having some die from old age or get taken in by other neighbors--one guy ended up with 3 "retiring" his back porch for example, we took 5 into our house. That's in addition to our 3 cats we already had... Anyway, yes, they went from eating anything and everything and wolfing it down to now actually being kind of picky and holding out for their favorites. Only one of the former ferals has ended up overweight, but she was actually the one who was hit by a car and after I got her surgery I took her inside because she couldn't go back out after that, so she's been inside the longest. My tame cats though--they eat whenever there's food and have a tendency to get chunky. They aren't as active though. The other day a mouse somehow got inside our house--first I've ever seen here--and the feral cats killed the poor thing in about 2 seconds flat but didn't eat him because they weren't hungry. One of my tame cats moseyed over and was like "hey, I'll eat that if you won't" but I didn't know what mice might be carrying, so I disposed of the body.