Secular thought reads animal cruelty, including predation, as the normal consequence of evolution, and the struggle for survival. Animal advocates commonly rue this as inevitable among “wild” animals, but unacceptable in the case of animals under human aegis. The nonconformist discourse of creation as harmonious song takes a different view: all animal suffering, including predation, is unambiguously abnormal, the fruit of the Fall, whether in domesticated or “wild” animals. Human sin has ruptured the unity and harmony of the world; cruelty is a dissonance, a discord in the whole of created existence. Since human behaviour is the root cause of the Fall, we must take responsibility for cruelty. In particular we must not make it worse by colluding in its cacophony. For nonconformists, this implied that we must care for domesticated animals; we must protect prey animals from predators where they come under human aegis; and we must never cause suffering for “sport”. Tone deaf humans, brought up to cruelty, must learn kindness. Following prophetic biblical texts, they envisaged a restored creation as peaceable, where the lamb would be with the wolf, not within the wolf (Is. 11.6, 65.25). Normative human behaviour is modelled upon the harmony of both the prelapsarian and restored world, not on the fallen, predatory one. Deliberate cruelty perversely reverses this by substituting suffering and death for peace and life. This chapter explores the consequences of this way of speaking for the way we treat animals, including its intersections with gendered narratives of violence.