animals on the ark

I don't want to take that time to read through all of this topic but I did see that John Woodmorappe’s book on Noah’s Ark came up in this discussion. I have it and it so full of total nonsense that one hardly knows how to start. I grew up on farms, and often stayed with a neighbor who farmed in very primitive style (Horses not tractors, no electricity and water pumped by hand or wind from a well). Since then I have worked with laboratory animals, had a friend who was a zoo veterinarian, and two of my cousins are animal trainers. In my opinion, based on considerable experience, Woodmorappe's ideas on feeding, waste disposal, loading the ark and so on and on are totally unworkable. The self-feeding and clean up methods he describes are not nearly as easy as he makes them out to be and would be particularly difficult and in fact unworkable on a boat. Remember that we not only have a lot of animals here we have a lot of different ‘kinds’ of animals. The Cincinnati Zoo has about 700 different kinds of animals, not 8,000 and I remember reading that about 1/3 of their staff of about 190 are just involved in animal care and feeding. No zoo has ever tried to care for 8,000 different species. Extrapolating from either modern farming methods or the number of animals of a single species that someone could care for as Woodmorrape does is just not valid. In his scenario, each person must care for 2,000 animals of 1,000 different kinds. Think about it.There are some things in the book I do find very amusing. One is that he refers to three papers by Peczkis without of course telling anyone that he is Peczkis. Another is when he writes.'For expample it is possible to train animals to urinate either spontaneously or on command into buckets'.In my experience you can generally expect cows or horses to urinate at the most inconvenient time and not on command. In any case, anyone who has ever seen a cow or mare urinate would rather clean up the mess than hold the bucket especially on a boat that would be moving around. This is a real howler that gets a lot of laughs from anyone with farming experience.He talks about expediting waste disposal by having slotted floors. Now that’s really bright on a three-floor boat. Just don’t get below the slots! I hope the bottom wasn’t slotted. And you better get rid of the waste. If you allow the waste from 16,000 critters to accumulate in the bottom of the boat for a year you are literally going to be in deep do-do.He talks about ways that special foods could be prepared for various animals but does not allow any time for that preparation in his time calculations.He talks about possibly using pelleted hay. This is completely ridiculous. There was an alfalfa pelleting plant built near our farm. It used some massive machinery and technology that was clearly beyond Noah.He talks about loading all those diverse animals on the ark at a rate similar to that attained when unloading hogs in a modern slaughterhouse.He talks about bringing the young of large mammals on board only a few weeks after birth so they will be smaller but completely forgets that they would have to be weaned first or you would spend forever feeding them even if you could get the milk.I could spend many hours discussing the things that are wrong with Noah’s Ark a Feasibility Study but I don’t have the time right now. Woodmorrape may have read a lot of books and papers on the subject but I doubt his level of first hand experience in caring for animals.The idea that all the animals in the world are descended from two members of each genus that went for a year-long boat ride with representatives of all the extinct genera and only eight people to care for them is absurd in the extreme. The impossiblity of eight people caring for enough animals to repopulate the earth on a wooden boat for a year is just another in a long line of falsifications of the flood myth.Randy

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Originally posted by Quetzal:
Hi randy.

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Yeah, Woodmorappe's a joke. However, in the interests of fairness, I asked my resident science advisor (Dani, age 8) to provide a reference list of critters that could have been on the ark two-by-two (except when it was seven). Once you accept the creationist hyper-"microevolution" from the ark kinds to the 11+ million species alive today (and rejecting the hollow Earth and ark-as-planetoid-sized-spaceship explanations), it's pretty easy to come up with the exact list of what could have been on the ark.

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Here is Dani's list of Kreated Kinds:

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Feathered Kind
Bug Kind
Plant Kind
Things-that-live-in-water Kind
Things-that-live-in-water-and-breathe-air Kind
Things-too-small-to-see Kind
Furry Animal Kind
Furry-animal-with-wings Kind (had to have bats in there somewhere)
Cold-blooded-animals-with-feet Kind
Cold-blooded-animals-without-feet Kind
Dinosaur Kind
Animals-that-live-in-water-sometimes Kind (she has a thing about frogs, for some reason)
Things-that-live-in-water-and-breathe-air-with-shells Kind (e.g., turtles)
Things-that-live-in-water-and-don't-breathe-air-with-shells Kind (e.g., clams)
People Kind

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As you can see, there were in fact about 15 species on the ark. She might have missed some - after all, she's only 8. Could've been housed in something about the size of a small yacht with a couple of acquariums. I don't know why AiG and ICR haven't realized how easy it is...

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Hmmm. That's a lot of micro evolution in a few thousand years. One might almost think it was macro evolution but of course we know that's impossible.
Randy

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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

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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

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What? You think people intuitively knew that it is OK to eat grasshoppers and not bacon cheeseburgers?

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Excuse my bad english please ...
I wonder, why JP is permanently referering to the Book Noah's Ark, by John Woodmorappe.

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No, I havn't read the book, but a bit of googling is enough to find some critical reviews about this book.

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I assume so. I have read the book and even the most negative reviews that I have read on the internet don't really adequately cover just how bogus it is. It would take a book to point out all the nonsense in the book. One of my favorites is the supposed possibility of teaching large animals to pee in buckets. Anyone who has ever see a mare or a cow pee would rather clean up the mess than hold the bucket. The other is taking baby animals of large mammals to save on space and food. He has forgotten what it means to be a mammal. I wonder if NOah had a big refrigerator full of their mother's milk and who supposedly took the time to hand feed them all. You can teach calves to drink from a bucket but you still need the milk and it is quite time consuming. Take it from someone who has spent a lot of time feeding baby calves milk from buckets.It is really obvious to me that Woodmorappe has absolutely no idea of what it would take to actually do the things he claims that Noah and his small family accomplished.Randy

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I think a worm hole opened just inside the main hatch.

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Either that or "Honey, I shrank the critters!"

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More seriously, once you posit divine intervention, why quibble about the logistics? What's the difference between inexhaustible baskets of loaves and fishes and an unfillable boat?

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If a being powerful enough to create the universe wants everybody on the boat, everybody gets on the boat.

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Maybe they had a replicator, like on Star Trek. You just walked up to it and said "Lion chow" or "Monkey chow" or "Bat food", and out popped the food you needed. Maybe it automatically scooped up dino dung and converted it into prime rib.I do remember a YEC on the old OCW board telling us that the explanation for biogeography is that God "teletransported" the animals off the ark to the appropriate locations around the world. It makes more sense than any other YEC explanation I have ever heard for biogeography. "Two roos to beam up Scotty"Transporting animals by sea in ancient times was very tricky under the best of conditions. Horses often died from being pitched around and animals often go "off their feed" in unfamilar circumstances. I have seen projectile diarrhea from cattle under less stress than they would suffer on the ark. A medium sized cow can hit you from about 10 feet away. I have seen it. Imagine that multiplied by several thousand.The idea that 8 people could care for thousands of different "kinds" of animals on a big boat with no steering during a flood that was supposed to be rearranging all the worlds geology is so silly that it would be totally laughable if their weren't some people who are so gullible as to take it seriously.RandyEdited by Randy, : No reason given.

On my most memorable occasion the perp was a 1,000 pound angus and the vic, who took it in the chest, was wearing a previously clean white dress shirt. If there had been any swear words I didn't know by then I would have learned them that day.Randy Edited by Randy, : spelling ect.