The Flood - Animals and their minimum food requirement

This is a spin-off of a topic in the geology forum and is intended to tackle one specific issue - that's of the minimum feed requirements for various types of animals.In Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study by John Woodmorappe. He puts the total number of "invited" organisms at 15,754 - this consists of 7,428 mammals, 4,602 birds and 3,724 reptiles (including dinosaurs).While we are never going to come up with a full-list, I want to get a better idea of the amount of feeding that the 8 people in the ark would have to be involved in. Even if we only establish a sub-set of animals, it will give a better idea of the task they had and also a resource for people to call upon in future debate.I know there are other connected arguments about where some of the "special requirements" food is going from - such as for the Koalas but at least at the start of this thread let's take it as a given that some unknown source of each food type exists.I am also assuming that we will all use american measurement?OK - the first two animals that have been mentioned on the geology thread are:Horses proposed by schrafinator

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This means that Noah, just to feed two horses and no other herbivores on the Ark, would need nearly 11,000 pounds of hay for 365 days.

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Of course, this doesn't even account for the fresh water that would have to be stowed on board, as nobody could drink sea water and they couldn't collect enough rain in 40 days and 40 nights to last them the other 325 days.

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Horses drink about 6-10 gallons of water a day, so this makes the two horses' minimum fresh water requirements for the year at 4,380 gallons.

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Elephant - proposed by Mangy Tiger

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Elephants need 300 pounds of food each per day (minimum).

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It's harder to get a figure for water consumption - estimates seem to be in the 180 to 230 litres per day range (40 to 51 UK gallons or 48 to 61 US gallons). We'll go for the minimum of 48 US gallons.

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So for two elephants we have:

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2*300*365 = 219000 pounds of food.
2*48*365 = 35040 gallons of drinking water

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So I make the current totals as follows: REMEMBER THIS IS NOT A THREAD FOR SPECIAL PLEADING - THIS IS A FLOOD WHERE GOD LEFT THEM TO GET ON WITH IT - NO MAGIC REQUIRED OR WANTED HERE - TRY NEXT DOOREdited by CK, : No reason given.

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

Already with just 4 animals catered for (forgetting for a moment the 8 animals there to take care of all the others) we have a SERIOUS quantity of food stuffs. Some dry store well but many do not. How do you store all that fresh produce for that amount of time in that quantity in a time before thermal heat exchangers?

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Anyway to add to the figures: For 8 humans;Water: Minimum requirement of water per day is between 2 - 4.5 litres . For argument we will take the upper limit as these humans have a lot of work to do.So we have (4.5 * 365)*8 = 13140 litres (3471.22 US liquid gallons) OkNot sure how to calculate the food side.. Edited by ohnhai, : added water data for humans

Well,Untitled DocumentA vetinary called Ron Hines reckons that a 350 pound adult male Bengal Tiger requires about 12 pounds of meat a day. Other big cats are similar. Females seem to need about 80% of that amount.Noah's gonna need some spare animals!!Edited by RickJB, : No reason given.Edited by RickJB, : No reason given.

So I make that (12*2)*365 = 8760 poundsAnyone know a water requirement?Is this a suitable example of a "kind" we would find on the ark? Any objections to Rick's suggestion?Ah - just seen the 80% comment - need to recalculate.Edited by CK, : No reason given.

More to the point, do lions, tigers, leopards, panthers, cheetahs and pumas all count as kinds?If so then (12*12)*365 = 52,560 pounds of tasty prey for the big moggies!Edited by RickJB, : No reason given.Edited by RickJB, : No reason given.

On the subject of feeding the predators the best way to store their food would be as live animals.Doesn’t take a genius to see this greatly exacerbates our calculations as to the amount of food stuffs we need to load AND puts a dint in the whole 2x2 thing as well.

Seriously the punch-line here is that it would take an ark the size of a small county to cart around a pair of every "kind" whatever that is. I don't really know why we need to make the ark story as believed by YECs even more rediculous than it already is. Obviously the story was told without the knowledge of how vast the "kind" biosphere actually is and as such the writers concieved of an ark big enough to deal with the many dozens rather than many thousands of species that would need to be preserved in a global flood.As rediculous as you try to make a non-supernaturally protected ark seem, the YECer only has to resort to their favorite catch all, "things were different." I mean common, we don't know what traits the proto-cat or proto-horse creature had. Maybe all animals had some kind of super-awesome-hibernate feature that they subsequently lost due to super-fast-hyper-mega-in-kind evolution that occurred right after the flood.Personally I think the whole YEC standard sequence of:{identify problem with a scientific Genesis} => {insert ad-hoc spastic, insane asylum style reasoning} => {self gratifying plausability to maintain worldview}is far more damning than just showing how rediculous it would be to get the myth to work in reality. At the end of the day you all are going to get some number of food/care stuffs that is many times the size of the proposed ark. But so what? As damning to the YEC misinterpretation of the flood story as it is, it is no where near as bad as the crazy talk that is bound to occur to reason away the base challange.

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Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)

Oh for sure - but I think it's just another useful tool to illustrate how much of a nonsense the story is. Sure it's never going to reach the die-hard but it's another factor for the undecided to consider.Let's face it - in some respects the nonsense they come out with in response IS the most powerful argument going for it's non-occurance.You've got to put down the bananas skins for them to slip up on! EDIT: actually now I think about it - it's more akin to giving them a banana, they throw the banana away and then chuck the skin on the ground and run at it.Edited by CK, : No reason given.

From wikipedia:
Dinosaur size - Wikipedia Its hard to imagine the amount of food these animals would have required.I also stumbled upon this (I know its just AiG - but still funny) :
Dinosaurs and the Bible | Answers in Genesis
Also read: "Why Do We Find Dinosaur Fossils?" , there they talk about the flood and the ark.

It seems, if we are trying to make the BEST case for fitting everthing in the ark look rediculous, that we should assume the dinos were not on board. I mean seriously, there were dinos that alone would fill the entire volume of the ark if you ground them up into sausage. The "honest" YEC would have to either dismiss the literal reading of the passage that 2 of EVERY kind was on board or they just ad-hoc away saying that Noah went and collected eggs instead of the actual dinos.

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Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)

Yes I think eggs are the general answer given.Must have been tricky to stop the other animals eating them when they were running around the ark leaping from hay bale to hay bale!So do we have figures for any other animals and then we can generate another running total?Does anyone have the feed requirements for the humans (we have the water requirements).

No idea CK, but often times a solution can be staring you in the face (hint: look at the title of the thread). Drilling a hole in the side of the ark below the waterline strikes me as an elegant solution. Things a bit tight? Drill another one Quite...

The saureans you have listed were most likely merely varieties of an original Kind, only two of which would have been taken on the ark, and not necessarily the largest specimens either, or necessarily full grown. Much of what is today called a "species" is in other words most likely just a variety of the original Kind.I'm unclear how many animals were still vegetarian at the time of the ark, although perhaps a vegetarian variety of dino was taken on the ark. I read on one creationist site recently that it is very likely most of the animals on the ark went into a state of dormancy or torpor, like hibernation, or a similar condition that occurs in some animals in hot weather that I can't remember the name of, and that this state of torpor may also occur under conditions of food deprivation. This makes sense. So that for a great number of the animals on the ark there was most likely not the enormous food and upkeep requirement that is supposed.There is absolutely no doubt that the dinosaur fossils are evidence of the flood as in fact all the fossils over the earth are evidence of the flood. Such an event, causing rapid burial of intact creatures, is the only way the conditions for such preservation could have occurred. Some of the dinosaur beds show great numbers of them all piled up together as if washed into their grave by one great rush of water. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I don't think drinking sea water would be very beneficial.Brian.