Monday, January 06, 2014
Feeding carnivores on the Ark
By Andrew Lamb — 11/15/2008
Creation Ministries International — Creation.com
Many carnivores, including lions and tigers, can readily manage on a vegetarian diet, and this may have happened on the Ark. See Teeth and Tucker for several modern cases of ‘herbivorous carnivores’. Dogs are considered carnivores, but dogs in some countries actually survive on a primarily vegetarian diet. During many years of working in Thailand, I observed that most pet dogs were fed on table scraps, which meant cooked rice was their staple food, as this was the staple food of their owners. And in Indonesia many dogs are fed mainly on vegetables—see note 5 here. Consider another carnivore, the snake. There is a widespread misconception that snakes can only eat live food, but there are commercial breeders today whose snakes thrive on dry food pellets. So there is no problem with Noah possibly doing the same for carnivores on the Ark—a mixture of grains and legumes would provide all the nutrition needed, including the building blocks for animal protein.
If it was unavoidably necessary for some of the Ark’s tenants to have meat in their diet, this could have been readily accomplished using salted meat, reconstituted dried meat, or fresh meat from fodder animals carried aboard for this purpose. Tortoises are a good example of a fodder animal. Tortoises can survive up to a year and a half in captivity without water or food. In olden days, the famous Galápagos tortoise nearly went extinct due in part to its popularity as a fodder food. Thousands were taken aboard sailing ships to be kept as a source of fresh meat.
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