Why Do Animals Suffer?

[tonyrey]

This is related to the natural problem of evil.

Imagine this - A fawn (baby deer) is frolicking around the forest. Suddenly, there is a strike of lightning and it causes a horrible forest fire. The baby deer is horribly burnt and suffers for 3 days before death finally relieves it of its pain, why does it happen?

Can you explain how it could be arranged that such coincidences never occur?

For other kinds of evil, like rape or murder, we can bring up the free will defense, we need to allow humans to do bad things to other humans for us to have free will. Of course, there are no humans involved here, so, it’s not any kind of solution.

Natural evil requires a natural explanation…

An all-good God prevents evil and suffering as much as he would

Without defeating the purposes for which life is created…

Certainly, it stands to reason an all kind God would not allow such suffering, especially if there was no good reason for it at all.

How do you know there are no good reasons?

If God can prevent the suffering but doesn’t, it raises the question of why.

Would you prefer to be an insensitive robot?

Of course, for some, that leads to the conclusion that God can’t possibly be all good and the kind of God Christians believe in doesn’t exist but obviously, not everyone takes this conclusion either.

Simplistic solutions to the design of an extremely complex world…

 

[The_Reginator]

An all-good God prevents evil and suffering as much as he would. Certainly, it stands to reason an all kind God would not allow such suffering, especially if there was no good reason for it at all. If God can prevent the suffering but doesn’t, it raises the question of why. Of course, for some, that leads to the conclusion that God can’t possibly be all good and the kind of God Christians believe in doesn’t exist but obviously, not everyone takes this conclusion either.

This kind of reasoning baffles me more and more as time goes on.
How can mere humans hope to judge what a ‘good and kind God’ should do? Our knowledge is VERY limited. Our minds are very limited. God is infinite and all knowing as well as all loving. He alone knows these answers.

I think the crux of the matter is a lack of understanding of the huge difference between God and man.
Back in my university days a friend (who went on to become an Anglican priest) prepared a few talks on the communicable and non-communicable aspects of God. In His infinite Wisdom God chose to create us as beings that do not have infinite wisdom.
There is all too often an assumption that if our human minds can’t understand something then it can not be true. If we have a different understanding than what the Church teaches then the Church must be wrong.
– A lot of assumptions being used with nobody noticing but it influences popular opinion in grave ways.

 

[Paddy_Walker]

animals probably do not suffer much in the wild. i saw a buffalo stuck in a muddy waterhole once. it could not get out, it did not drown but was dead before the next morning. the animal weighed probably a ton and was perfectly healthy. it just got stuck and died very soon after.
domestic animals possibly suffer more because they have human carers working hard to prolong their life beyond their natural lifespan.
pain in animals is just a type of sensory feedback allowing the animal to learn how far it can push its body without damaging it. when the animal is injured beyond repair it seems possible that it dies quickly. i saw a polar bear lie down and die one night from hunger, the day before it was trying to carry away a 500lb walrus by the scruff of its neck.
but a human stuck in the waterhole, like the buffalo, would not be likely to die overnight and as long as there was some water there a person could live for several weeks, though beyond 6 weeks without food there would be irreversible and fatal damage to internal organs.

 

[LongingSoul]

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not an animal nut, and it bothers me when people places the lives of animals over those of people. Still, I recently had a pet die and it was very difficult watching him suffer at the end of his life. I was under the impression that humans experience suffering and pain as a result of our sinful nature. Animals can’t sin, so why them?

I personally can’t watch the David Attenborough programs and that ilk that show animals being preyed upon in the food chain,… let alone my own pets suffering.

My comfort rests in the Scriptures in this regard.

“*Then God said, O“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” *” - Genesis 1:26

If we know that God regards us in this way … animals must surely sense their role in the life of this world within their capacities to “know” also. God doesn’t seem to be Someone who would be so cruel as to not have programmed all His creatures with the sense of their “place” and how their suffering has meaning in the big picture of the world.

 

[tonyrey]

animals probably do not suffer much in the wild. i saw a buffalo stuck in a muddy waterhole once. it could not get out, it did not drown but was dead before the next morning. the animal weighed probably a ton and was perfectly healthy. it just got stuck and died very soon after.
domestic animals possibly suffer more because they have human carers working hard to prolong their life beyond their natural lifespan.
pain in animals is just a type of sensory feedback allowing the animal to learn how far it can push its body without damaging it. when the animal is injured beyond repair it seems possible that it dies quickly. i saw a polar bear lie down and die one night from hunger, the day before it was trying to carry away a 500lb walrus by the scruff of its neck.
but a human stuck in the waterhole, like the buffalo, would not be likely to die overnight and as long as there was some water there a person could live for several weeks, though beyond 6 weeks without food there would be irreversible and fatal damage to internal organs.

In addition to which we can never know precisely to what extent another person or animal suffers. All we can do is generalise… I know from personal experience that both a state of terror and self-hypnosis can result in anasthesia.

 

[The_Reginator]

I’ve always thought of another, related, difference between human suffering and the pain of animals.

When an animal suffers it is experiencing a very unpleasant event.
Not only do humans feel physical pain, but we are also scared of the future. For instance if we have a seriously injured limb we would be concerned that we might loose that limb and that would add to our suffering.

 

[Peter_Plato]

As I understand it, analgesics are administered based on body weight, so of course infants get less than adults. The question is: Do they get less because they’re not self-aware? If what you proposed is true, then infants should get even less than what might be otherwise indicated based on their weight. Now it may be true that infants suffer less *psychological *stress because they’re not self-aware, i.e. no “Woe is me!” or “Why me?”, but that doesn’t mean that they also suffer less physiological pain.

Another consideration is that infants are at the beginning of their development cognitively and psychologically. We have no idea of the impact on their psychological development that great pain over a prolonged period might effect. Second, analgesics are probably administered more for the parent’s or other proximate adults’ discomfort at seeing the infant in pain than they are out of consideration of the infant’s pain. Third, we simply don’t know what is going on mentally in the mind of an infant, so it is likely more a case of better be safe than sorry concerning addressing the pain than it is about real knowledge about the child’s pain.

I suggest you read Nature Red in Tooth and Claw: Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering by Michael J. Murray for a complete treatment of this question.