Claim CH514.1:
Although a few animals have specialized food needs, such animals are rare,
the needs are often exaggerated, and the specialized diets are not labor
or space intensive. In short, the specialized dietary needs of animals do
not prevent the voyage of Noah's ark from being feasible.
Source:
Woodmorappe, John, 1996. Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study, Santee,
CA: ICR, pp. 111-117.
Response:
- Woodmorappe did not consider all animals with special needs. Just
because some snakes can be coaxed to eat nonliving food, for example,
does not mean all can.
Most problematical, Woodmorappe did not consider terrestrial
invertebrates, especially insects, which must
have been on the
ark. Many insects only eat a single species of plant. Keeping all
the plants alive for a year would have taken considerable resources.
- Some animals' needs may be exaggerated, but Woodmorappe grossly
exaggerated how easy it would be to deal with them. Many animals, such
as the platypus, are difficult to keep alive during transport even in
the best of conditions (Fleay 1958). Noah could give hardly any
attention to individual animals and would have had to keep them in nigh
intolerable conditions. Modern livestock shipping often results in
high casualty rates, even though only domestic animals are shipped, and
they are at sea only a few weeks.
- Woodmorappe noted that some animals can be fed artificial diets. He
failed to note that the artificial diets were developed by the work of
hundreds of researchers working over tens to hundreds of years. Noah
would not have had that knowledge to draw upon.
- Some of Woodmorappe's solutions to feeding problems have problems of
their own. He proposed feeding insectivores by breeding insects on
grain in special compartments, and letting the insects escape into the
cages of the insectivores through perforated pipes. Some of the
escaping insects, however, would escape into the general grain stores,
reducing a great deal of the food to waste before the voyage was over.
References:
- Fleay, David, 1958. Flight of the platypus.
National Geographic 114 (Oct.): 512-525.
created 2003-8-9
