The book of Job, especially chapter 39, implies that God created
the nephesh creatures (“soulish” animals like birds and mammals)
to serve and/or to please human beings. They are termed soulish
because God has endowed each of them with a mind, a will, and
the capacity to express and experience emotions. These animals
are equipped and motivated to emotionally bond with and to
nurture, serve, and please other members of their species and
human beings. Moreover, these nephesh species were evidently
endowed with this capacity before any human even existed, a
characteristic that appears problematic for evolutionary or
naturalistic scenarios. Recently, a British team of research
psychologists has published a paper announcing the discovery of
a new bonding feature between humans and nephesh creatures.
Their study demonstrates for the first time that human yawns are
contagious to domestic dogs. For their experiment they tested
twenty-nine dogs from twenty-four different breeds spanning ages
two to fifteen.1 Twenty-on