Snape, Hagrid and Animals

[hekatesheadband]

No: HPFGUIDX 143646

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "leslie41" <leslie41 at y...> wrote:
>
> With all this talk about Snape and his "deplorable" attitude towards 
> Neville's toad, I wonder why more isn't made of Hagrid's complete and 
> utter imbecility with regard to animals.

> Hagrid to my mind is the dangerous teacher at Hogwarts.  Just because 
> he's too dumb to know better is not really an excuse.  He is the last 
> person who should be teaching "care of magical creatures".
> 
> He cares for his pets more than he does people, or at least his reason 
> is obscured by his affection for them, and several times students are 
> nearly killed because of it.  

Now me: I agree, from the animals' point of view as much as the
humans'. This is pragmatic more than theoretical - Snape is puerile
and sadistic, while Hagrid is only foolish and self-indulgent. That
makes him less sinister, in my book - I doubt he'd try to murder
anyone's pet for the fun of it. 

That said, Hagrid is doing animals no kindness by breeding agressive
creatures for which he can't care, then locking them in crates to keep
them from killing each other (or students). And then there are the
acromantulae - a wizard-created, non-natural species native only to
Borneo, imported into the Forest because Hagrid felt like it. (I can
forgive his getting Aragog as a naive thirteen-year-old, but Mosag?
Really.) Can anyone suppose that the native magical creatures who need
the habitat are adapted to that? What do you suppose the acromantulae
eat? And that's just the start of it. What did he think he was doing,
getting a dragon and trying to raise it away from its kind, in an
unsuitable environment? 

The smaller shame is that he's a horrid teacher - Care of Magical
Creatures, as opposed to Abuse of Monsters, could be a wonderful
class. Actually, it was starting on the right foot until the incident
with Malfoy and Buckbeak - and I'll add that while it was foolish of
Hagrid to start his first lesson, with beginner students, with
something like Hippogryffs, that was entirely Malfoy's fault. Plenty
of kids would probably be interested in learning about phoenixes and
runespoors and, at more advanced levels, thestrals and dragons and
such, and the care of sick unicorns and pet nifflers are important to
learn.

So in a nutshell, Hagrid: not actually malevolent and deliberately
evil. However, the only animal I'd like to be around him is Fang.

Animal love,
hekatesheadband

Because the Sorting Hat is really Bono.