As we all know, suffering is a large argument against God's existence. All together it is the problem of evil. Many solve this by pointing out original sin and free will, we bring the evil upon us. Well, what about animals? They are programmed and conditioned so do not freely choose anything the way we do. It seems likely they cannot even truly understand their own suffering. So where is God's love for these animals? Sure, pawn it off on humans for harming the enviornment, but it doesn't solve everything. Honestly it seems more malevolent to let an animal suffer than a human from God's percieved perspective.
Thoughts?
Well, first of all, as a Jew, I don't believe in Original Sin. I do think a considerable amount of human (and some animal) suffering is brought about by human free will, though.
As for the rest...Isaiah 45:7 attributes to God the authorship of both good and evil. And yet, in the context of the verse, the word we generally translate as "evil" makes more sense if rendered "chaos" (as opposed to rendering
shalom, which is usually translated as "peace" here as "order").
What I think this is pointing at is that the universe lives in the nexus of three forces: the divine plan (or whatever terminology one wishes to employ to convey the idea that God intends for certain things to happen sooner or later in the universe); the free will of sentient, self-aware, reasoning beings (i.e., humans and any other equivalent creatures that may exist elsewhere in the universe); and the natural processes of the universe itself, which include chaos, entropy, and evolutionary processes like natural selection (and it is these processes I think are responsible for most animal suffering).
While I don't think that the divine plan includes the suffering of specific individuals (human or animal) as acts of commission, I think that by prioritizing human free will and by creating the universe to function as it does, a case can be made that God is responsible for everyone's suffering by acts of omission (that is to say, He didn't create the universe differently, and didn't deprive us of free will even though He knew we would often abuse it).
So what I am left with is either being unable to accept that God is not omnibenevolent and being unwilling to let go of the question of why didn't He create the universe differently, or taking a leap of faith that, if this is the universe He did create, as opposed to any other imaginable scenario, He must have had reasons for doing so-- quite possibly, reasons that we, as finite beings within that finite universe, are unable to perceive and comprehend.
I choose the latter, although I can also understand why some might choose the former.