When we move beyond the Sunday School answers and consider these episodes from an animal studies perspective, however, the stories begin to yield important insights into the development of a viable Mormon ethic of interspecies and intercultural care that, according to Mormon thought, has (or should be perceived as having) implications of eternal significance. Lehi’s family’s experience in the desert illustrates the doctrine that would shortly be articulated more directly in the Book of Moses (1830) and Joseph Smith’s translation of Genesis 9:11, in revelations that would be canonized as sections 49, 59, and 77 of the Doctrine and Covenants (1831–32) and, most explicitly, in the 1833 Word of Wisdom: the idea that animals are eternal beings possessing spirits, are subject to Christ’s atonement, are more than Cartesian automata or symbolic screens for human spiritual needs and truths, and that their lives—like human lives—are to be taken only under strictly defined conditions.