This book,
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN
by
C. S. LEWIS,
posted by AlexDTX is actually a good read.
(Thanks Alex)
The only author I know of that has addressed this is issue is CS Lewis in his book,
"The Problem of Pain" The book addresses pain in the world in general but he spends several chapters asking the same question as to why animals suffer when sin is the fault of mankind. The link to the book is a free online html version of the book.
The Problem of Pain, by C. S. Lewis
Even just the chapter on animal pain:
IX. ANIMAL PAIN
I don't know if the author is correct, but he's smarter than me, and has a comforting theory for those who have lost an animal. He seems to think that the animals that we have had as tame pets could live on through us. Plus the book is free, and that's just my kind of price.
Snip:
"Now it will be seen that, in so far as the tame animal has a real self or personality, it owes this almost entirely to its master. If a good sheepdog seems “almost human” that is because a good shepherd has made it so. I have already noted the mysterious force of the word “in”. I do not take all the senses of it in the New Testament to be identical, so that man is in Christ and Christ in God and the Holy Spirit in the Church and also in the individual believer in exactly the same sense. They may be senses that rhyme or correspond rather than a single sense. I am now going to suggest—though with great readiness to be set right by real theologians—that there may be a sense, corresponding, though not identical, with these, in which those beasts that attain a real self are in their masters. That is to say, you must not think of a beast by itself, and call that a personality and then inquire whether God will raise and bless that. You must take the whole context in which the beast acquires its selfhood—namely “The-goodman-and-the-goodwife-ruling-their-children-and-their-beasts-in-the-good-homestead”. That whole context may be regarded as a “body” in the Pauline (or a closely sub-Pauline) sense; and how much of that “body” may be raised along with the goodman and the goodwife, who can predict? So much, presumably, as is necessary not only for the glory of God and the beatitude of the human pair, but for that particular glory and that particular beatitude which is eternally coloured by that particular terrestrial experience. And in this way it seems to me possible that certain animals may have an immortality, not in themselves, but in the immortality [128] of their masters. And the difficulty about personal identity in a creature barely personal disappears when the creature is thus kept in its proper context. If you ask, concerning an animal thus raised as a member of the whole Body of the homestead, where its personal identity resides, I answer “Where its identity always did reside even in the earthly life—in its relation to the Body and, specially, to the master who is the head of that Body”. In other words, the man will know his dog: the dog will know its master and, in knowing him, will be itself. To ask that it should, in any other way, know itself, is probably to ask for what has no meaning. Animals aren’t like that, and don’t want to be.
