So, I'm in my senior capstone class this semester.  The topic of my class is animal history and we have to write a 20-25 page thesis paper about something related to animals. The plan for my paper is to discuss the interpretation of snakes and wolves in popular culture.  For the most part, I just get to read stories and watch movies to see what the character of each animal.  I've actually found a lot of stories about wolves.  One of the books that we had to read for class, Vicious by Jon T. Coleman, told folklore stories about wolves that would follow families through the woods in Ohio and in order to save their horses or cattle, parents would feed their children to the wolves.  Stories like this were passed down to future generations as bedtime stories, even though they were mostly nightmares.  This reminded me of two things.  The first in the "Little Red Riding Hood" story, because the wolf eats the grandmother, and wants to eat "Red".  But it actually reminded me more of Lycaon because the families were given a choice about what they could offer up to save themselves, and they chose to give up little children (four of them) instead of give up an animal.  It's a pretty far fetched comparison to make, because these families weren't feeding their children to the gods, but they were still offering up humans to take make some sort of point.
There's a certain sense of naivety between all of these stories.  Lycaon for some reason thought that giving the gods human flesh to eat was a good idea, and that the either wouldn't get  caught or wouldn't get punished.  Red Riding Hood, trusted the wolf, even though it was apparent that it wasn't her grandmother.  And the people in the stories thought that they would be safe if they just offered up one of their children to save themselves, even though they had to repeat the sacrifice three more times, before the wolves finally left.  The idea that these people all acted similarly, at least in their motives, is a way that these stories all connect.  And how they all somehow come back to Metamorphoses even though all three stories are from different time periods and different parts of the world.