>>Furthermore you don't send a child out with a spear until they know how to
>>use it.
Many children are sent out to fight every year, often with little more training or knowledge than how to pull a trigger, and how to put a bullet in the gun first. Aiming, what's that? Sad but true.
>>While the O/i youngster has a better chance fighting than running from the
>>wolf. The threats are vastly different.
>
>Not true, if wolves are after livestock, which is the most likely,
>then running back to get help is the far better option. Both for
>the individual and the clan. The alternative risks a youngster
>imagining s/he is a hero and capable of taking on the wolf pack
>by themselves. Result a dead herder, dead and scattered livestock
Wolves tend to run from humans, not fight them. A child guarding sheep does much better to stay and drive off the wolves and is perfectly capable of taking them on, unless the child is of such small size that no one would put them out to guard sheep in the first place. If one did run then the wolves would kill some sheep well before any adults could get there.
>Even in the RW & within the last century & in a peaceful, stable western
>culture all rural kids could expect to learn to shoot before their 10th
>birthday & carried a rifle far more than could be expected given the level
>of threat (virtualy nil in Oz). And yes many were killed through clumsyness
>but it took a massacre for the practice to be even moderately curtailed.
>Even so the law allows for children under 14 to learn to shoot.
We weren't rural and got our first gun when I was twelve. We had been taught the rules by then. No one I know who was given a gun by their father and taught about it ever injured himself through clumsiness. Those who had accidents were the ones whose fathers never taught them and who bought their first gun themselves as young adults, without supervision. This massacre you refer to, did this really happen? Details? It would be good if children were taught gun-safety. It would also be good if more adults practiced it.
>But O is a warrior god & neither O or E are specialist healer gods. If 48%
>of my population was initiating into a warrior cult I'd have pretty fair
>grounds for saying it was at the heart of the culture.
Ernalda does have healing powers. Orlanth is only partly a warrior cult. He's also a farming god, which is what most people worship him for most of the time.
Daniel
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