In a post on Christian Scholars Review, Ryan Bebe laid out the territory as follows:
Given that the fossil record demonstrates eons of animal death and predation before the advent of humanity, most authors recognized the difficulty of maintaining the classical cosmic Fall as an explanation for the presence of animal death in our world.
Yet, some thinkers explored the possibility of retroactive or angelic Falls to account the life and death we see in nature. Others deemed that these aspects of the living world are necessary for the existence of some other good—pain being necessary for simple self-preservation, for example—or because a natural world with evolutionary pain and suffering might be the only way to bring about moral, sentient beings like humans. Some scholars attempted to reconsider specific attributes that have been ascribed to God—his love, power, and activity—in fairly radical ways, while others looked to kenosis as an explanation for why God might voluntarily limit himself in terms of how he interacts with the world.
Still other thinkers focused on the value that suffering can have or the promise of eschatological redemption, while some even insisted that there really isn’t even a problem here, because animals may lack the neurological capacity to suffer, even if they can experience some form of pain.
In other words, animal suffering has become the locus for discussion about the rightness or wrongness of suffering in general. It has become the locus of debates around theodicy, predating Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor by many hundreds of thousands of years.
Works cited by Bebe are: Bethany Sollereder, God, Suffering, and Animal Cruelty; Christopher Southgate, The Groaning of Creation; Michael Murray, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw.
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