I just simply want to give the same attributes I have for "cars" directory to "animals" directory. In other words, how can I de-privilege that specific file in terms of permissions?
drwxrwxrwx 14 root root 4096 Nov 26 19:41 animals
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 4096 Nov 16 16:59 cars
sudo chown -v user:user /path_to/animals changes both the folder owner and the group from root:root to user:user.
Now that root is no longer the owner, sudo is not needed anymore.
chmod -v 755 /path_to/animals changes the folder's access permissions to the same ones as cars.
If there are files and folders inside the animals folder and you wish to change their ownership and permissions too, add an R next to the -v option so that the commands look like:
sudo chown -vR user:user /path_to/animals
chmod -vR 755 /path_to/animals.
Typing something like file and folder permissions linux on Google, will give you plenty of results on how they work.
