Hello and welcome to She Wolf Night. This blog is mainly about the paranormal including ghosts, monsters, urban legends, UFO's and cryptids. We also cover subjects of folklore, myths and legends. I sometimes mention stories about the natural world. I base my posts on information from books, websites, articles and even historic records, which I always give links to. There will be some content that readers may find disturbing. Finally I will point out that this blog uses cookies.
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Tuesday 6 July 2010
Mother wolf
The mother wolf is fascinating as a subject, as such myths circulate around it, and figures appear in memory and imagination. The most well-known being the shewolf mother who nursed Romulus and Remus the twin boys. She is associated with the triple goddess, who goes by many names.
"The Amazons, who worshipped the Triple Goddess, incorporated a tribe called the Neuri, who "turned themselves into wolves" for a few days each year during their main religious festival, presumably by wearing wolf skins and masks. The same story was told of a certain Irish tribe in Ossory, who became wolf-people when attending their yuletide feast, devouring the flesh of cattle as wolves, and afterward regaining their human shape."
(Source):
She Wolf
Mother wolves have been responsible for the upbringing of feral children. These children have been discovered in a wild state, behaving with wolflike characteristics and were raised by wolves from an earlier age, possibly when they were infants.
Feral children
The shewolf spends between 60 and 65 days of pregnancy until giving birth. The nursing mother wolf is called a lactating bitch and a shewolf is called a bitch. This is also the same for a female of any of the canid species. Now the fact human females are called this in a derogatory way as a woman was considered similar to a shewolf during heat. It comes from the Old English "bicce" and Old Icelandic "bikkja" meaning a female dog. This is used as a form of insult made at a woman and sexual behaviour. Another word similar to this is when calling a woman a "dog" is said out of insult. This is either made towards a promiscuous woman or an accusation of a woman's behaviour. Since ancient times women have been called canine names as a form of verbal abuse. "Shewolf" has always been titled for women of infamy, aggression, bad temper or blood thirst.
Bitch
Coming away from the negative side, the shewolf mother is considered nurturing, kind, protective, maternal, warm, loving and comforting. This is how she is to her pups and also the rest of the pack. The mother and grandmother wolves (including aunts, sisters and other shewolves) behave maternal and loving with their young. It is the gentle side of the wolf that most people are unaware of. Study nature in all it's angles and you'll discover how these wild animals behave and coexist in harmony like this, and always guarding their young.
The woman has always been menstruating once a month or every 28 days since the end of her last cycle. Between that period is her ovulation time and there is a peak when she is considered mostly fertile. Also a woman capable of having a child is in her teens, twenties, thirties and forties. There are some who may differ and today with modern science older women can have a child. In nature, normal fertility for a woman starts to wane after the age of thirty. When a woman is pregnant, gestation lasts nine months athough it may be seven, eight or ten months for a few other women.
Many women are finding it difficult to nurse their young as they cannot properly feed their babies or because some have no milk! These women are finding it difficult to cope with the fact they cannot breastfeed their children in the ideal sense as they've been pressured into doing something that everyone tells them is considered "natural" and "proper". There is no information in maternity units about women who are unable to breastfeed and there isn't any support for women who can't breastfeed, except guilt because they cannot. Midwives do tend to support women who find it difficult to feed their newborns. What there is constantly is the slogan "Breast is Best" seen and heard everywhere, adding even more pressure on women. This makes a lot of mothers feel quite depressed if they haven't been succesful at breastfeeding their babies. Hospitals have decided to withdraw information on formula/powder milk and hygiene/sterilising bottles. The breastfeeding campaigners want all women to cease bottlefeeding their young and so they put pressure on the medical profession to encourage mothers to do this, implying it is not "forcing" any woman to feed a particular way. This puts babies at risk who have mothers that cannot simply feed them breastmilk.Some women who can breastfeed choose not to do so in public as they either want to be discreet or use bottled milk (that may include formula). It seems as if there is no such thing as a woman who cannot breastfeed from the way doctors, breastfeeding campaigners and other sources go on. How come I know many women who couldn't breastfeed, including a nurse and also myself? In the past, especially during pre-industrial ages, some women employed wet nurses because they could not feed their own babies. Some women can't get their babies to suckle and babies have even rejected their mothers if hungry. It's one of life's mysteries. Things are not simply black and white.
A site on breastfeeding problems
A woman is not like her earliest ancestors. A domestic dog is not like its earliest ancestors or its wild relatives. There are many physical differences between a modern domestic dog and a wild wolf. The shewolf isn't like a shedog of the house. In captivity the wolf can live 20 years and that's longer than the lifespan of a domestic dog. The bones of the animals are not the same. The howls are not the same (woves don't always bark). The charateristics of behaviour are not the same, not even the eyes. Perhaps it explains why evolution has a reason for why wolves behave this way and not dogs. Or why women behave differently than others, such as being fertile, less fertile, more sexually active, not interested, milk production, no milk, genes for types of diseases, no such genes, ect.
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