This chapter investigates the historical emergence of animal suffering as a significant challenge to Christian belief during the early modern era. It explores why creational violence and suffering were not initially considered moral or theological problems for premodern Christian faith. The first part of the chapter examines Augustine of Hippo’s creational theology as representative of the premodern Christian plausibility structure, with its specific metaphysical, moral, and hermeneutical commitments. This Augustinian framework seamlessly integrated natural evil and suffering within a Christian narrative of reality, depicting such troubling features as morally neutral aspects of a mysterious and inherently beautiful cosmos. The second part of the chapter explores the decline of the premodern Christian plausibility structure, resulting in a profound transformation of how Western thinkers attended to natural phenomena. This shift, alongside the tremendous upheavals of the early modern period–––political, religious, and cosmic––reshaped social and cultural perceptions of suffering, provoking the searching philosophical and theological debates on the problem of theodicy. The challenge of animal suffering to Christian belief arose within this context, representing an especially intense variation of the broader philosophical problem of evil for modern thought.