Red Riding Hood Wolves and War

It is likely that in the wilder parts of Europe at one time wolves where not an uncommon sight, though shy around people they will at times watch and follow humans, or move past the village. People would have seen these animals and perhaps not minded them at all, and in some places people may have even spoken with and or revered them.
Wolves are of course predators but like many predators they do not as a rule tend to like the taste of humans.
This however can change, once an animal has eaten human enough they acquire a taste for it and so are more likely to attack, this is not necessarily simply a matter of an animal which is starving, at times it can occur for other reasons.
There are been a number of wars in Europe's history, wars which left many people dead, this often occurred as people began to move and spread out. Further plagues and other diseases often left millions of people dead. This mixed with potential famines gave wolves many opportunities to scavenge corpses, even as very little cubs.
The humans in such a situation could suddenly become food where they had never been food before, thus the reason Little Red might not have realized how bad the wolf was.

Of course there are many interpretations of this story, but the function of this blog is more to communicate random ideas on fairy tales.

Keep in mind that fairy tales change over time as people and cultures change and so many fairy tales are made up of different thoughts and ideas.