Reposted from April, 2005:
Not only must the animals themselves be kept, what about food for them all? Looking at carnivores, lions, for example, eat on average 8 to 9 kg of meat per day, but can eat up to 25 kg (females) or 43 kg (males). Here are some more examples of the food needs of other carnivores:
Bobcat -- 40 lbs/week
Cougar or Leopard -- 100-150 lbs/week
Lion or Tiger -- 200-250 lbs/week
Fox -- 25 lbs/week
Coyote -- 25 lbs/week
Bear -- 100 lbs/week
One animal refuge that keeps 40 large carnivores states that it goes through 10,000 pounds of meat per month, so for every 40 carnivores on the ark, Noah would have needed about 12,500 pound of meat for the trip. If he had 100 carnivores, he needed over 31,000 pounds of meat.
Because refrigeration technology in Noah's time would have been a tad bit inadequte for the job, the best way to keep that much meat fresh would be to keep it "on the hoof," which means they would have had to have literally herds of game animals (plus smaller animals, such as rodents, etc., for the smaller carnivores) just to provide food! So now you've got to have tons of grain to feed not ony the Representative Pairs of herbivores, but to keep the food animals alive as long as they're needed.
Let's not even get into whether Noah took animals by kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, or species. If the anti-evolutionists are correct, then all the species already existed, right? Global species estimates range from 2 million to 100 million species. Ten million is probably nearer the mark. Only 1.4 million species have been named. Of these, approximately 250,000 are plants and 750,000 are insects. We can probably rule out birds and aquatic creatures (or can we?), but that still leaves millions of species of land animals.
What about dinosaurs?
As you can see, the logistics of the whole thing quickly approach the absurd.
