Wwwerewolves (was Further speculation on Dates in WW

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

No: HPFGUIDX 46027

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., Barb <psychic_serpent at y...> wrote:
> 
> (she also rewrote werewolf lore with the part about animals not 
> being in danger from werewolves; legends are full of werewolves
> killing farm animals). 

I always understood that bit about werewolves being a danger only to 
humans, not animals, to mean that the scent of "human" works on 
werewolves such that they are consumed by an overwhelming rage and 
hunger ("bloodlust" for short?) that compels them to mindlessly 
attack and destroy the human (or their surroundings and eventually 
themselves, if confined so that they can't get at the human - source 
of the horrific shrieks in the Shrieking Shack), but contact with 
(other) animals (hmm, what about veelas, merfolk, giants?) does not 
drive them into a frenzy. I never thought JKR or RJL was suggesting 
that werewolves can't kill and eat an animal for hunger, or kill an 
animal for sport or because it annoyed them. Just that as long as 
wolf-Remus wasn't driven mad by the scent of human, he could 
remember that *these* animals were friends, not food.

The Shrieking Shack is close to the rest of the village, and they 
ran around the campus and even into the village, so it seems to me 
that they must have been catching scent of "human" all the time. So 
the two beasts big enough to control a fully-grown (and frenzied!) 
werewolf herded him away from his natural prey, but he must have 
fought pretty hard against them to get at the humans (as when he 
fought Sirius after the ill-timed transformation you were just 
discussing -- he smelled the humans and aimed at them, and Sirius put 
himself in the way to protect the humans), so they must have gotten 
fairly clawed and bitten in those fights, so I guess the people who 
interpret the controversial sentence, above, as meaning that a 
werewolf's bite is only *infectious* to humans not animals are also 
right. (Being killed by the werewolf isn't harm, but being infected 
with lycanthropy is harm.)