> ...So I question the paper's accuracy. It just doesn't add up. What am I missing?

Unless I am mistaken, the authors of this paper are the same three individuals who developed FeedBee, so it appears to have been executed and published by FeedBee's insiders and promoters.

If this is true, I should have thought that the Journal would have mentioned that potential conflict of interest prominently.  A potential conflict of interest does not necessarily indicate that a work is compromised, but that information should be available to readers.

Since I don't see that relationship mentioned, or missed it somehow, now I'm curious: what sort of reputation does this journal have? How did they assess the credibility of the work?  I am sure they must have consulted experts who found the study plausible, even if some readers here have problems reconciling it with their own experience?  I hope so.

Without commenting on the believability of the study, I should mention something I found particularly odd:  Although the word "independent" appears seven times in the paper, and although there is mention of "three independent feeding experiments", these tests would appear to me not to be "independent" in the sense many or most of us would understand the term "independent" (as in performed by disinterested third parties).  Rather the word "independent" as used in the paper seems to mean that the tests were conducted separately from one another.

I'd love to see this test replicated by "independent" researchers, independently.

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