animals on the ark

I've only ever read two books of the Bible (neither of which was Genesis) and even I know it isn't two of each kind - it's two of each of the unclean kinds and seven of the clean kinds.Or the other way round As I understand it the Bible is none too clear on what a kind is either - since according to the story there were at least two different sorts of bird (raven and dove?) sent out by Noah the birds at least weren't just represented by a pair - or heptet - of some ancestral bird.Actually from a quick dig around in the species listing for birds in Wikipedia you might want to reconsider the comment you made in Message 125 that kind basically means genus - just for birds two or seven of every genus is a whole boatload of animals

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Never put off until tomorrow what you can put off until the day after

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You live in a farming community, ovbiously you don't live on a farm. 2 animals (2 of each kind) is not too much work. feeding/ caring for 2 animals would only take about 10 minutes. x8 people you get 16 animals every 10 minutes.

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How many animals were on the ark? By the best estimates there are 10 million species on the planet. No ark is that big. Having only two individuals doesn't work because there isn't enough genetic variation within the population, the chances that animals in subsequent generations will be inbreedin is nearly 100%. Most of the offspring would be deformed and have severe genetic problems. Basically, all of the species would inbreed themselves into extinction, and that includes the single human family. The current ecologically-defined minimum of a viable breeding population is several thousand animals, that's really low, even low tens of thousands is generous. Try caring for 5,000 of each animal, no matter how loosely you define a "kind". BTW it is clear from the phrase "after it's kind" that kind means reproductive compatibility which is the definition scientists use for a species. Don't give me any of those exeptions, scientists are well aware of them, it seems that nature doesn't like to fit into clean boundaries we would like to put it in. Anyway, point is, kind and species mean the same thing whether you like it or not, it's the same concept of reproductive compatibility.

And we also have quite a few "kinds" of birds listed as unclean in Leviticus chapter 11: Bat?

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400 people. Don't forget that those 400 people include, cashiers, security officers, garbage colectors, janitors, managers, gift shop workers and vendors. If you divide everyone up you'll find that the people who actually work with the animals are much fewer then you thought. Possibly as low as 20.

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Actually the Philadelphia Zoo has 10 keepers just devoted to caring for their 378 birds. IIRC the Cincinnati Zoo has about 190 people not counting volunteers who work to care for their 700 different species of animals. Even a small zoo will have far more staff than there were people on the ark and they had to care for the boat as well as the animals.

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And those 20 people don't live there and work normal, eight-hour shifts. Noah worked longer then eight hours a day, I can tell you that.

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Actually zoo keepers often work more than 8 hours days as anyone who know animal keepers knows. We used to have zoo vet as a consultant for our animal use committee and it was rare day that he and his staff only worked 8 hours.

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You live in a farming community, ovbiously you don't live on a farm. 2 animals (2 of each kind) is not too much work. feeding/ caring for 2 animals would only take about 10 minutes. x8 people you get 16 animals every 10 minutes.

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That's 2000 every 20 or so hours.

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Do you live on a farm? I grew up on a farm. Your numbers are a bit off. You have to do far more than feed large animals. You have to clean up after them as well. Some of the animals on this boat are going to eat things that require quite a bit of preparation and this boat needs far more than 2,000 animals. A conservative estimate comes from Woodmorappes at 16,000 in his totally bogus feasibility study.

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But, you also have to factor in the fact that many animals can go into hibernation and stay there for a good period of time. If even a quarter of the animals did that you would have a much easier job.

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Very few animals actually hibernate and those that do hibernate in winter cold weather. It is not going to be cold on a boat with thousands of animals confined into three decks, sealed with pitch and with decaying manure to make heat.I have a lot of first hand experience caring for animals large and small sometime under fairly primative conditions. I used to stay with old fashioned farmers who used horses instead of tractors and didn't have electricity. I have also worked on boats and it makes life a lot harder. The idea that 8 people took care of thousands of animals on a big boat during a year-long flood is simply absurd.Randy Edited by Randy, : No reason given.

Genesis 6:15 And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits.6:16 A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it.You seen to know as little about the Bible as you do about animal husbandry and atmospheric sciences. Vapor canopy indeed. Even most YECs gave up on that nonsense long ago.Randy

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You forget that all carnvores are fuly capible of being sustained on herbivoric food.

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Nonsense, snakes, cats and raptors are obligate carnivores. They can't survive on vegetables and won't even eat them. How about the little brown bat. It eats live insects and consumes about half its weight each night. How did they feed them on the ark? How about all the other species that only eat live prey or have very specialized diets? Do you think they fed the rattlesnakes grapes?

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how insects like fruit flies and mosquitos, that reproduce unimaginably quickly, were kept from being a monstrous pest
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I do not have the anwser to that off the top of my head, however, the ark wasn't meant to be a pleasure cruse.

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Here are a few more questions about insects from a thread I started a few years ago.It is absurd to claim that all of the approximately 850,000 species of insects on earth are descended from those who survived the flood either on floating mats of vegetation or on the ark as accidental passengers as creationists claim these days.
In fact, the vast majority of insect species and in some cases entire families and even orders could not have survived a year of flood on floating vegetation and many, perhaps the majority of species could not have survived the flood either on or off the ark.Consider the 1500 species of the order Ephemeroptera (Mayflys), which only live in fresh water and in which the adult lives only 1 day or less (some only live 90 minutes) during which it must mate and lay eggs. Even if they somehow survived the salty flood water, (which most could not), they will be greatly spread out by the flood. How will they find their mates and where will they lay their eggs? There are many other insect species that only live in fresh water during parts of their life cycle. How will they survive the flood? Or did Noah have a fresh water stream on board the ark somehow?Then there are the social insects such as bees, ants and wasps,that require a queen and a colony. How will they survive a worldwide flood on floating vegetation? In Ohio we have large wasps called sand hornets or more properly cicada killer wasps. They dig their burrows in sand or soft earth and lay their eggs in locusts that they have killed. The adults do not survive over winter. How will their eggs survive a worldwide flood? You can usually wash them out with a garden hose if you want to.The caterpillar of the Monarch butterfly only lives on living milkweed plants, Monarchs go through more than one life cycle a year and the adults only feed on nectar. While many species of lepidoptera eat various plants, many others eat only specific plants, even if the caterpillars survived somehow, how would cocoons survive, and even if they did how would the adults find other adults to mate with and where would they lay their eggs. Generally, all these life cycles are complete in a year or less and in many cases much less. Many of these butterflies and moths are quite fragile. Many other insects require specific living plants or animals for parts of their life cycles. What about all those insects that feed on nectar from living flowers during parts of their life cycles? How would they survive a year on floating vegetation?How about desert insects and arachnids that are adapted to live in very dry climates? Do you really think they could all survive for a year in water on floating vegetation?There are also the cicadas, like the so-called 17 year locusts, that live most of their lives in the ground under a tree, then emerge, live for a short while, mate and lay their eggs in the branches of a tree. After a few days or weeks the eggs hatch and the larvae drop to the ground to live under the tree till the next cycle. They need healthy trees that will live until the next cycle. How did they survive a worldwide flood that supposedly rearranged all the world's geology on floating vegetation? What about all the other insects that require mature living trees for their life cycles? How could they have survived after the flood? Or did Noah have a forest of live trees growing on the ark with cicadas living in the soil beneath them?There are huge numbers of parasitic insects and invertebrates that require specialized animal hosts for at least part of their annual life cycle. Do you think those poor animals on the ark were carrying all the parasites of their respective 'kinds'? Did the humans carry all the fleas and ticks and other insect parasites that plague mankind? What about all the other invertebrate parasites, such as liver flukes and blood flukes, some of which are fatal? Did the animals and people on the ark carry all these parasites?These are only a few examples. I am sure that anyone with knowledge of entomology can think of many, many more.Randy

Bat indeed.For some reason the verses you quoted have made it so I can't get the reading from the Book Of Armaments in Monty Python and the Holy Grail out of my head. I think it's 'cos the cadence fits so well.

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Never put off until tomorrow what you can put off until the day after

What, you haven't heard of the floating vegetative mats?

It would have made a lot more sense to just take on enough animals to keep the Noah clan in meat for a year and then recreate the animals after the flood. You would think God would have thought of this, being God.Also - on the clean/unclean animal thingy. We are many years before Mosaic Law here so Noah wouldn't have even known what a "clean" animal was. Small detail, I know, but still it does make one wonder.

I'm sure he did. The reasonable thing to do when you notice something odd in the Bible, or at least what a believer does, is wonder what GOOD reason God had for doing it instead of assuming your own first impression is the correct one. It's called humility in some circles. It is generally understood by Bible believers that what God gave in the Mosaic Law was simply explicit statements of what had been known intuitively to humanity already, in the first generations after Adam and Eve, before the Fall had blurred their thinking beyond recovery. Given as explicit law to counter continued corruption and to fix it in the form of written commandments.Or possibly not simply intuitively known previously as it's highly likely that God and Adam communicated more than is reported in the Bible. The skills of growing crops are somewhere later said to have been learned from God as I recall, implying that all kinds of necessary knowledge was learned directly from Him.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Faith writes

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Or possibly not simply intuitively known previously as it's highly likely that God and Adam communicated more than is reported in the Bible. The skills of growing crops are somewhere later said to have been learned from God as I recall, implying that all kinds of necessary knowledge was learned directly from Him.

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Exactly! Doubters might point to the inhabitants of the pre-colonized Americas as people who never heard of the bible or god yet somehow managed to learn how to farm. What they missed is that Jesus did come to the Americas and even left another version of the bible for later generations to find. We now know them as Mormons.

The people at that time intuitively understood that creation occurred through natural processes, not by "poofing" the animals into existence.

God's written word is given with power. It doesn't get lost "for later generations to find." Not to mention that there was no reason for Jesus to give a special gospel to the Americas any more than, say, to Mongolia or Australia. The idea is completely at odds with the Biblical revelation. And so is everything else about the BoM.

Funny, the writer of Genesis had no problem "poofing" animals, plants, man, earth, sun, moon and stars into existence just a few chapters earlier.

if you're refering to genesis 1, it says that the earth brought them forth.but you're right -- since god did this in a single day, i see no reason why he couldn't have done it again after the flood.

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