What Kind Is It?
Interesting Facts and a Game You Can Play with Friends
By Jeanne Dennis
Animal Kinds
When God created animals, He made them in groups the Bible calls “kinds.” He designed the animals to reproduce after their own kind. If an animal is one kind, it cannot have babies of another kind. For instance, an elephant cannot have a monkey baby.
The Hebrew word for created is “bara.” So the created kinds are called “baramin.”
In every kind, we find lots of different animals. What kind are the animals on this page? They’re all in the same baramin. Some fly. Some don’t. Of course, they’re all part of the bird kind!
Why We Have Different Kinds
Through the years, many varieties of animals have developed within each kind. It’s because of the information God put into their DNA, which determines how they will look, what they can do, and so on. All of them have been designed by God to be exactly what they are.
Changes Within a Kind
When animals live away from other animals of the same kind, they eventually lose some of the original traits. For example, you can see an example of this in dog breeding.
Dog breeders keep poodles away from German shepherds and both of these types away from chihuahuas, and so on. Otherwise the dogs could produce puppies that would be a mix of the two parents. If a collie and a bulldog had puppies, they would not be collies or bulldogs. They would have a mix of traits from both parents.
Sometimes a population can have mutations (changes in the DNA) that stay in the population. Evolutionists will try to tell you that mutations over millions of years brought about all the kinds of animals we have today. But mutations have never brought about a new animal kind. That would require adding lots of new information to the DNA. And that’s not the way DNA or heredity works.
Heredity is when created things inherit characteristics from their parents. Heredity works in plants, animals, and humans.
No matter what changes come, the babies born to birds are always birds. The babies born to the dog kind are always the dog kind. Horse kind animals have horse kind babies, and so on.
What Kind Is It? A Game to Play
You can play a game with your friends about how animals are divided into kinds.
Below are three lists of animals. Each person takes a list. For each animal, they write which kind the animal comes from: cat, dog, or bird. If you have more than three people playing, make extra copies of the lists. The person who gets all of them right the fastest wins.
List One
bird
bobcat
cat
cheetah
chick
chicken
chihuahua
coyote
Dalmation
dingo
List Two
dog
duck
eagle
German shepherd
jackal
jaguar
kitten
leopard
lion
lynx
List Three
mountain lion
ostrich
parakeet
peacock
poodle
puppy
robin
tiger
turkey
wolf
That wasn’t too hard, was it? I’m sure you don’t think that a chicken belongs to the dog kind or that a poodle belongs to the cat kind. God made it easy for us to see how some kinds are divided. Sometimes it is hard for us to tell what kind an animal belongs to, but God knows.
A Unique Kind
There is one creature God made in an extra special way. No other creature is anything like this kind. What kind is it? It’s HUMANkind. That’s you and me. God created us in His own image. We each have a body, a soul, and a spirit. Animals are not made in God’s image. They can’t do what people can.
People can make decisions, think (or reason), and invent all sort of amazing things. We can build skyscrapers and tiny computer chips that can hold amazing amounts of information (But it’s only a super-tiny amount compared with DNA).
We can tell right from wrong, create art, music, and stories. We can choose to obey God or not obey Him. We can know God through His Son Jesus Christ. God made us to love Him and to be His very own children. We can have a close relationship with God. No animal can do any of these things.
Only One Kind of Humans
God made many kinds of animals, but the Bible doesn’t say He made different kinds of people. All people are the “people kind.” We all have the same pigment, melanin, to color our skin. Some have more of that pigment and others have less. That’s why we appear darker or lighter.
We are all made in God’s image. It doesn’t matter how different people look, where we come from, or what language we speak. All of us were made to know and worship God.
Read what the Bible says about us in Jeremiah 27:5, Genesis 1:26–28, Genesis 5:1–2, and Psalms 139:13–16. Then thank God for making so many different animals and for making you in His image.
Answer Key:
Cat Kind
bobcat, cat, cheetah, jaguar, kitten, leopard, lion, lynx, mountain lion, tiger
Dog Kind
Chihuahua, coyote, Dalmation, dingo, dog, German Shepherd, jackal, poodle, puppy, wolf
Bird Kind
bird, chick, chicken, duck, eagle, ostrich, parakeet, peacock, robin, turkey
The top photo has an ostrich, the largest bird in the world, and a crowned crane. All photos are used by permission of Pixabay photographers.
Want to know more?
Find out more about why there are so many different animals in each kind by reading The Oldest Writing in the World.