Bronze-level articleCaring for the animals in Noah's ark

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Rescued from the

Global Flood

Icon flood.svg
Seven of the clean kind
Just sit right back and you'll a hear a tale, a tale of a mighty trip - that started from this tropic port, aboard this tiny ship...
—Apologies to that awesome sitcom creator, Sherwood Schwartz.

The story of the global flood in the Bible has Noah and his immediate family (8 persons in total)[1] caring for two of every kind of animal in the entire world. In his book Noah's Ark:A Feasibility Study, creationist author John Woodmorappe asserts that only 8,000 kinds of animals would have been taken on the ark.[2] The total would probably have been a lot more, but we shall concede this point for the purpose of expediency. Even if only 16,000 animals were to be brought on that ark, eight people could not possibly have cared for them all.

Contents

[edit] Watering

Each animal would have to be provided with sufficient fresh water each day. If we say that watering an animal took only 20 seconds then that gives us 88 human-hours of work watering animals per day.

More problematic would be the source of the water itself.

If the flood waters were used, some method of purification would be needed to remove the silt, salt, and other high concentrations of toxins. Distillation would require a tremendous quantity of fuel and labor. Filtering it through sand would be painfully slow and would require tons upon tons of sand weighing a minimum of 90 pounds per cubic foot[3] The sand would then have to be changed periodically due to mineral buildup. Solar distillation would require sunlight, which would be lacking for the first forty days of rains, and vast surface areas for water to evaporate and condense. Chemical purification and boiling, ignoring the impossible logistics, would do nothing to diminish the toxic levels of minerals. No matter the purification method, a method to move thousands of gallons per day, from the waterline to upper levels, would be needed.

Storing water from before the flood would have been even more absurd. Assume that at least 100 of the animals had at a minimum the water requirements of a goat. A goat requires more than two gallons of water per day to survive.[4] Water weighs about eight pounds per gallon. For these 100 animals alone, 200 gallons of water would be needed each day, weighing in excess of 1600 pounds. To last 376 days, 75,200 gallons, weighing almost eighty tons would have to be brought aboard and stored, without compromising the buoyancy and stability of the Ark -- for just these 100 animals.

It is conceivable that a system of ducts could have captured rainwater and watered the animals for the first forty days of heavy rains. However, the problem remains that 336 days of water would need to be stored, purified, and/or captured. Only by heavy, regular rains would this be conceivable, which of course contradicts the statement that the rains stopped on the fortieth day.

[edit] Feeding

Feeding all the animals would be literally impossible. If we accept a generous estimate of each person being able to feed one animal every 30 seconds, this means that 133 human hours of labor would be needed to feed every animal each day (Keep in mind, eight people equals a maximum of 192 people-hours per day). Perhaps some of the animals could be used to replace the human toil, if the design of the ark included provisions for this - but there is no note of such engineering in the Guide to Truth Bible.

Also, making the lions and tigers and bears to eat pellets of grain for 40 days and 40 nights, all while surrounded by nice warm living sides of T-bone steaks and New York Cuts and filets mignon would have been a difficult task. The carnivores would probably have needed fresh meat on a daily basis, leading to the extinction of many unfortunate species.[5]

[edit] Dung

Living in piles of their own dung is very unhealthy for most animals, and before long their health would suffer. The animals on Noah's ark would have to have their cages cleaned periodically. In most places that care for animals, this is done once a day. Eight people cleaning 16,000 cages a day is absurd. A healthy human, working hard, can clean roughly 100 or so "average" cages or stables in a really tough workday. Remember the above, we also had to allocate time to providing water and food.

Let's take a closer look at what it takes to clean an animal's cage.

  1. Setting the estimate low we could say the process of removing the dung took 60 seconds for a large cage, 10 seconds for a small cage. We could say the average time spent per cage would be 30 seconds.
  2. The dung would have to be thrown overboard eventually so, again setting the estimate low, we could say the cleaner would have to empty his waste container only every 20 cages.
  3. The time taken to empty the waste overboard would vary on the position of the cage being cleaned. The ones on the deck below the water would take longer to empty their waste than the ones on the upper decks, while the ones working in the center of the ark would take longer to empty their waste than the ones on the edge. Setting the estimate low again we are looking at 3 minutes to empty waste.
  4. Calculating this out we are looking at 17 human hours of labor removing dung.

Of course, if Noah had built various magical machines (mostly powered inclined planes and those "screw" things), the disposal of the poop would have been a bit easier.

An alternative explanation is that each animal cleaned its own enclosure periodically. However, given the lack of opposable thumbs for most of the species on the ark, this explanation is implausible.

Certainly since Scripture related nothing about the places which we said were set apart for the excrement of the animals, but tradition preserves some things, it will appear opportune that silence has been maintained on this about which reason may sufficiently teach of its importance. And because it could less worthily be fitted to a spiritual meaning, rightly, therefore, Scripture, which rather fits its narratives to allegorical meanings, was silent about this.
—Origin (AD 184/5-253/4) [6]

[edit] Urine

Animals also pee. Animals on the top deck would not need to have their urine dealt with because the decks could theoretically be slanted so the urine would flow out into the ocean. (God must have supplied really detailed blueprints for Noah to get all this right.) The urine on the bottom decks, however, would have to be manually removed or else it would build up and sink the ship. Say there were only 10,000 animals on the bottom two decks. Say, setting the estimate low, each animal only peed on average one fourth of a cup per day. That gives us 2500 cups (165 gallons) of urine that needed to be bilge pumped per day.

Now, reasonably, the most a person can carry[7] is about eight gallons per trip.[8] That results in roughly twenty trips per day of "piss duty".

[edit] Parasites

Consider the African eye worm for a moment (Loa loa filariasis). This is a species that survives exclusively in humans. That is only with a human host - so Noah or one of his family member would have had to carry it. Even assuming baraminology, and the super-evolution required to diversify organisms from the crudely defined "kinds", there would be more than enough parasites left for humans that at least every human on board the Ark must have been infested in order for them to survive. Similar things can be said of parasites of other animals.

The creationist answer to this largely involves ignoring it until it goes away.

[edit] Swamp theory engineering

An alternative is to design the ark so that it will carry an entire ecosystem similar to a swamp, so the bacteria and plants will utilize the urine and fecal matter, and have water vapor for collection (via metal plates or glass). However, the size of such a swamp will far exceed the assumed dimensions of the ark, given the number of animals on board. Water makes up a large proportion of the mass of a wetland such as this, and of course water is tremendously heavy. Assuming a pound of waste material per animal per day (the larger animals which produce many pounds of fecal material per day balancing out the smaller creatures), from 8000 animals in a 376-day period equals approx 1500 tons of waste material during the Great Flood. To avoid becoming a fetid, dead swamp, and to allow the natural waste digestion process to occur, the waste products would have to be extremely diluted, with the swamp having perhaps at least fifteen times the mass of all waste products produced by the animals. Thus the swamp could perhaps have to weigh over 20,000 tons, which would require a Handysize cargo ship to carry this waste processing swamp alone. The Ark would have had to be a vast ship to carry such a mass along with all the animals and feed. Also, a sophisticated plumbing system would have to be employed, because such a swamp would be on the top deck of the ark (it requires sunlight), while urine and fecal matter would need to be transported from the lower decks. Even if you have only one deck for everything (with caves or shelters for the animals; remember it's raining most of the time so animals roaming free to self-distribute probably wouldn't work) plumbing is still needed because those have to be manually distributed across the entire swarm. As pumps and other sophisticated plumbing devices are not available for thousands of years, we can safely assume they are manually transporting the urine and fecal matters into the swamp.

[edit] Injury to animals

One oft overlooked aspect of Noah's Ark is how the animals would have even survived their journey even if they were non-eating flesh robots that produced no waste. The pitch and roll of a ship would have tossed animals about in their cages, creating a constant source of injury to anything larger than a mouse. Under the extremely severe weather conditions posited by the global flood even if the ship's integrity would have held (it wouldn't have) most of the 'higher' animals would have been turned into chunky salsa after a few months of this treatment. The larger animals could have been hooked up to some sort of hammock device inside the cages to stop them from being thrown about too much, but this would require much more space.

[edit] Conclusion

Adding up all the hours we get that the 8 inhabitants of Noah's ark would have had to perform, as a conservative estimate, 239 hours of labor each day. That means 29 hours of labor a day per person, Noah and his family must have been extraordinary people! Especially extraordinary since sleep has not been accounted for.

Alternatively, all this was possible back then because Goddidit.

And immediately after the Ark landed and the animals exited the Ark, the first thing we hear of from the Bible is that Noah offered up a sacrifice from each of the clean animals. After all that work in saving them.

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

  1. Noah's Family "Noah's Family had eight core members".
  2. Answers in genesis
  3. [1]
  4. [2]
  5. Such as the Grestevask and Drobenbear.
  6. Homilies on Genesis 2.1 (page 75) translated Ronald E. Heine Catholic University of America Press, 1982 volume 71 of The Fathers of the Church, A New Translation
  7. For the purpose of the discussion we do not assume God has revealed to Noah about technologies such as plumbing, pumps and siphons, so it does have to be carried away if the animals are within their individual partitions of the ark.
  8. That's sixty four pounds, reasonable for a tough bronze age farmer.
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