YET SCOTLAND HAS AN OBESITY CRISIS:

Survival of the less fit: The mystery of Scotland’s shrinking sheep may have been solved (The Economist, 7/03/09)

Tim Coulson of Imperial College, London, and his colleagues examined the weights of about 2,000 female sheep that lived on the island in the two decades of their study. They combined this information with detailed histories of individual animals. They found that daughters were, on average, lighter than their mothers had been at the same age. Their legs were shorter, too, suggesting that the breed really was shrinking.

Why is this happening? The researchers, who published their results in the current issue of Science, suspected that it might have something to do with climate change.