Claim CH514:
The eight-person crew aboard Noah's ark was sufficient to feed and care
for all the animals.
Source:
Woodmorappe, John, 1996. Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study, Santee,
CA: ICR, pp. 71-81.
Response:
- Three hundred and twenty full-time employees are needed to care for
fewer than 3000 animals at the Washington National Zoo (Grimaldi and
Barker 2003). Granted, many of these would be working on
administration and visitor concerns that would not have existed on the
ark. Still, assuming that only a quarter of them cared for animals,
that is still eighty people to care for 3000 animals. On the ark,
there were eight people to tend more than 15,000 animals (assuming
Noah's crew were not needed to do maintenance and bail water). They
would have had to work more than fifty times harder than professional
zookeepers. Double shifts are not enough to make up the difference.
Accepting Woodmorappe's number of 15,754 animals aboard the ark, and
assuming the crew attended to them sixteen hours per day (a very
generous assumption), each animal would receive an average of about
thirty seconds of attention per day for all its needs.
- Labor-saving mechanisms proposed by Woodmorappe are unrealistic. For
example:
- Watering many animals at once via troughs would not work on a ship.
Most of the water would slosh out as the ark rolled with the waves.
- Automatic feeders would allow pests to infest the food. Animals
with automatic feeders would probably eat more and waste more food,
too, increasing the amount of food that must be stored. Woodmorappe
did not account for the extra space required.
- At least one third, and probably two thirds, of the manure could not
be disposed of by simply pushing it overboard, since it would be
below the water line. The manure would have to be carried up a deck
or two.
- Woodmorappe did not consider some time-consuming tasks:
- The ark itself must be maintained. It would be a miracle if bailing
alone were less than a full-time job.
- All of the hoofed animals would need to have their hooves trimmed
several times during the year (Batten 1976, 39-42).
References:
created 2003-5-7, modified 2003-7-12
