But it always bothered me because I have seen in Gods character that He loves all creatures great and small. See Matthew 6:26 for example, Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?
And consider Psalm 147:9 which says,
He gives to the beast its food, And to the young ravens which cry.
So there is much evidence that God loves and values the animal kingdom ...
Well, farmers feed their animals too, it's not necessarily out of love.
The furthest we could go on that basis is that God wants the "birds of the air" and "the young raven" and so forth to
exist. This would also explain why he had specimens saved from the Flood.
Now there are verses in the Bible that tell people to be kind to animals, and make it out to be a virtue ( Proverbs 12:10, Exodus 23:5, Deuteronomy 25:4, Exodus 23:12-13) but then again there are verses in the Bible instructing us not to kill. It seems evident that God is not bound by the morality he enjoins on others.
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A similar question could be asked about the Fall. Most creationists will tell you that there was no death (and hence no carnivory) before the Fall. The justice of punishing the animal kingdom for Adam's sin may seem questionable to us, and yet it is widely believed that this was the case.