1 Moby Tom: Meow!
2 Ishmael: Moby Tom!
3 Ishmael: So thre're animals here too?
4 Steve: {surrounded by critters} It was nothin' personal, I swear! Crikey!

Apparently the issue of whether or not animals exist in the traditional Christian idea of Heaven is an open question. A quick Googling led me to hundreds of pages purporting to answer the question, "Do animals go to Heaven?" (or, more to the point for many of the people who care about asking such a question, "Will my pet go to Heaven?"). Many of these pages quote scripture as a means of providing evidence one way or the other, and most of them come to no definite conclusion.

In fact, many of the pages seem to be advice pages for clergy, to give them some guidance when parishioners ask the question. The answer seems to be, "Well, we don't really know." These pages all tend to conclude that, whatever the answer - which we'll find out when we get to Heaven ourselves (if you stop sinning, that is) - whether we end up seeing Fido again in the afterlife or not, we'll realise how marvellous God is and that obviously he must have made the right decision after all, and we'll be happy ever after no matter what.

Well, either way, the Infinite Featureless Plane of Death is merely an afterlife, not an example of "Heaven".

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2021-09-04 Rerun commentary: If animals do go to Heaven...

There are going to be a hell of a lot of ants and mosquitoes and other assorted bugs.

Fruit flies have a complete life cycle of about 14 days. So not only are there billions of fruit flies alive right now, but in two weeks there'll be a different few billion fruit flies, while the current billions will all be off in Heaven. Add a few more billion more fruit flies to Heaven every fortnight, and that adds up to... well, more fruit flies than you can possibly imagine.

Basically, when we get to Heaven, we'll all be wading through molasses-like swarms of fruit flies.