Again with the werewolves and werebears and such in PIE!

I have found that my interest in trying to find common Indo-European
traditions and legends related to animals continues to be very
strong. I have already mentioned in a post a few pages back about
were-bears and were-wolves as being possible reflexives of wolf and
bear cults in the army, or a negative attitude the priestly class and
the agricultural class may have held about the army.

However, that is only two creatures, and while those creatures are
cross-culturally very, very important, there are surely other beleifs
surrounding other creatures that have been overlooked.

For example: there is a suspicion that between the beliefs of the
Greeks and the Old Indians on medicine, the rat (or possibly the mole-
rat) was considered to hold important medical properties. Whence
comes this belief? Is it related to the use of the root *muHs as
mouse, muscle and steal?
Or the strange case of the hare: *kehsen means "the grey one". How
descriptive. There was surely some taboo around rabbits and hares.
Now, what on earth could have caused a taboo on such a seemingly
harmless creature?! Could it have to do with "the Rabbit in the
Moon" - if you look the the Moon when it's at a certain tilt, it
looks like a leaping lagomorph [i.e. rabbit or hare] - ?

What other kinds of beliefs of likely PIE origin does anyone know
that are tied to animals?


In addition: does anyone know of werewolf stories from Lithuania or
Latvia? Anyone know of Indo-Iranian werewolf stories? Albanian ones?
Or Armenian ones? Or at the very least, does anybody know the words
for "werewolf" in those languages? It would be most wonderful if
similarities could be found across the swath of the Indo-European
languages and cultures!