Changes in mythology

This article is a work in progress. Feel free to connect the dots.

(This article is currently in a rambling stage.) Ideas of animals change with the mindsets and observations of people. Wolves were seen as quite aggressive, but conversation efforts pushed and pushed. Eventually, thanks to a trend in wolves in film, TV, games; and softer depictions of wolves with puppies on YouTube, and some information holes depicting few attacks of livestock or people; some people of the early 2000s became quite insistent that they were non-violent beasts who were all loving and definitely would never eat a sheep or human. Therefore, our understanding of wolves has changed thanks to stories and people's efforts to shift our minds. This same aspect applies to religion and it's other names: superstitions, folklore, and spirituality.

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As an example, the traditions of an American Indian tribe are subject to change thanks to colonialism. This is often the result of the evolution of the people, from being forced onto new land to converting their religion and adapting to white culture. A person who is a member of a tribe may say that the whites recorded it wrong due to their personal biases or the secretive people lying to appease them. However, this is not always the case. While controversial, there are trusted trade partners, missionaries, mixed raced scholars, and other trusted individuals. Back in time it is not so simple as enemy vs victim: people spoke to one another. They tried their best to communicate. They, as an individual, weighed the pros and cons of telling this foreigner about their ways. It may have been quite easy to the individual because there was no wrong, or it may have been quite difficult. They may have added notes to the discussion, leading to the written word to be written down in a specific way. These notes may have been to emphasize a particular aspect, or hide a certain aspect, or just to phrase it as such when it didn't need to be phrased exactly. The foreigner writing these words down may have been doing their best as an ally at the time of colonization for these people. They may have been ethnologists with an invested interest in assuring the quality of their work. Or they were made to do a job they didn't want to do. Many different individuals would be interviewed by these willing and sometimes unwilling ethnologists. These works were written down in order to keep the history; whether for future generations, for nefarious purposes such as missionary conversion strategy, or for white people to learn so that they may change themselves. These works that were so carefully preserved are now occasionally being usurped by indigenous peoples who focus solely on oral traditions and find them mostly faultless. This writer is indigenous as well, and I'm quite annoyed that our attempts to "preserve our culture" is more about emphasizing what the last few generations of colonized Indigenous know rather than looking at the history as a whole and regathering our older traditions. When writing these articles it is of great importance to remember that Indigenous traditions and personalities change over the course of generations. Therefore, what you see in an old book spoken by an indigenous person told to a reporter, is different than what a modern indigenous person will tell someone. Therefore considering the dates and the exact peoples are heavily important to the understanding of religions.

Traditions can change as fast as a single individual who changes their mind on it. They talk and/or act upon these inner insights or conflicts, and thus can make a religious element change in their society. Effectively, they make it trendy. Trendy is a casual sounding word in English, and the use of the word in a religious context may offend some people, however the changes within a society are effectively dominated by trends in the culture, as a whole or in a subculture.

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Animals too have culture. When different animals live in different places, they not only adapt to the surrounding environment, but somehow have different tempers. One area of black bears may be more aggressive towards their prey, for example. Or they may be more willing to get closer to humans, and it all depends on the particular locality. We can say that they are responding to factors such as local and tourist human behavior, or environmental factors, but the exact causes of how each bear population reacts in response is either not well documented, not thoroughly explained to the public, or potentially a result of unknown factors resulting in parenthood.

Animals also change in culture. White-throated sparrows have changed their songs, and it slowly spread from the 1990s to 2020 until the old song was practically erased.

I recall a story from a book that I read in the early or mid 2000s describing how some people decided to reduce the wolf population. They decided to kill all of the older wolves, because the older they get, the less important (ageism). They did so, killing the older wolves in a family and leaving the teenagers. The result was that they tried and tried to kill the bighorn sheep they were used to killing, but they just couldn't figure out how to maintain their footing on the mountains to run and hunt them. As a result they moved down the mountain and became rabbit hunters instead.

The notion of animals having a culture is seen as irrelavent, but nonetheless my observations of various neighborhood feral cat populations indicate such differences. I have even observed cats having effectively color segregation, where the snow-shoe colored cats were attacked by the black and black-and-white cats on the porch. The former two also only tolerated each other, allowing their bowls to be close to one another but still choosing to stick to their own colors in those close feeding areas (a group of black cats feeding next to a group of black-and-white cats).