I'd say it just wouldn't be nutritious. Though maybe you can't create an animal if you intend to eat it, because magic. My interpretation is that while humans can intuitively understand hunger or consumption, they cannot intuitively understand and certainly cannot visualise nutrition in all its hard science complexity. Therefore, they cannot intend to create nutritious food. And without intent, there's no magic.

 

It's not actually clear whether or not they were transfigured, since this (much like the idea that Death crafted the Hallows himself) is simply a legend passed down by wizards, to which there is generally a widely varying amount of truth. However, I would like to point out that the possibility of untransfiguration implies that transfiguration, while potentially permanent, is not complete. When Moody turned Malfoy into a ferret, any biologist in the world could have taken blood samples and tissue samples and examined the ferret's DNA and determined that, yes, that is physically a ferret, and they would laugh at the implication that it might have ever been anything else. However, without even bothering to ask which student the ferret in question is, McGonagall can easily swish her wand and turn it back into Draco Malfoy. This implies that she is not telling the object to turn into Draco Malfoy, because she had no idea which student it was, but rather that she was telling it to undo itself, and the ferret held within it (magically) the information about what it used to be.

In other words, when you transfigure something, you don't actually erase what it was before, implying that transfiguration is a purely physical process. There's no hard proof for this, but it's what makes the most sense imo: JKR has stated in interview that transfiguration (as opposed to charms) is a restructuring on the molecular level, and so the physical change must therefore be complete. There can't be little human bits mixed up in the ferret, it's just a ferret now. So how does the ferret know to turn back into Draco Malfoy?

Well, in the same interview, she mentioned how charms add properties to something, even if nothing is physically different about them - this implies that an object's magical properties are separate from its physical ones. For example: magically, a featherlight-ed bag has the property of "weighing less", even though it is no different physically than an un-charmed copy of that bag. Thus, I imagine that transfiguration has changed Draco into the ferret physically, but it has not changed anything about him magically - he is still Draco Malfoy, and if you gave him a wand and taught him to clasp it in his furry paws, I like to think that he could cast a mean Serpensortia.

This becomes relevant to the discussion in that a rock transfigured into a Phoenix would lack any of the original creature's magical properties, given that transfiguration cannot add those. However, combined with the correct charms (not that any we see can deal with Life and Death), perhaps a reasonable approximation of one could be formed.

 

My interpretation would be that parents transfigured healthy nutritious food into something their children find delicious, just for the taste, and when it wore off, they would get all the original nutrients from the healthy food without having had to taste something they found gross or disgusting.

tl;dr magical parents can get kids to eat their vegetables by making it taste like candy.

 

Given enough love potion, anyone can be transformed into a magical animal.

Wait, what?

 

Sounds like a summary to a Harry/Draco fic.

 

I thought that ment you couldn't transfigure it out of air.

 

Regarding the myth about Quintapeds being created by transfiguration, it doesn't matter whether or not it's true. What matters is that wizards who understand the way transfiguration works think it could be true, as shown by them sending Ministry wizards to attempt to untransfigure them. If wizards who understand transfiguration believe it possible to create magical animals with transfiguration, then it probably is possible.

Alpacaman: I agree that transfiguration is a purely physical process, but I disagree on the point about ferrent Malfoy being able to cast magic. For a start, he doesn't have his mind: Dumbledore tells us in his commentary to Tales of Beedle the Bard that the animagus transformation is the only way to keep your mind as an animal.

I think untransfiguration works better as a reversal process (doing the transfiguration backwards, into the thing it was before) than a removal process (removing the transfiguration to reveal what the object is "underneath"). The removal process implies that there is some kind of continuous active magic maintainig the transformation (which is then removed), which goes against the purely physical, permanent nature of transfiguration. Reversal also fits nicely into what we know about magic. Dumbledore tells us that all magic leaves traces, so untransfiguration would be using those traces to force an object back down its "object history".

 

In Harry Potter, the word Magic gets used in a lot of different ways, but one of the ways is a... Let's call it a spark. The spark is boolean, you either have it or you don't. Have it, you are a wizard. Don't have it, you're a muggle. It is the thing that makes a person magical and let's them do magical things, which are magic and then have magical results (see what I said about lots of magic...). I'd also expand that and say it is something all magical creatures have. Indeed, I'd say it is what separates a magical and a non magical creature.

I also think this spark is one of Gamp's five exemptions.

You can't use transfiguration to turn a muggle into a wizard, because that would be creating a spark. Likewise, you can't turn a chicken into a Phoenix because again, that is adding the spark.

That said, Gamp only stops you creating his give exceptions ex nihilo. If the target has the spark, I think you should, at least in theory, be able to transfigure something into a magical creature. Wizards into Quintapeds would be the canonical example of this. Wizards have the spark so they can be transfigured into creatures with the spark. Likewise, you could (again in theory, likely hard for an inordinate number of reasons) turn one magical creature into another.

In the interest of honesty, I will point out one canon problem with the above theory, and that is the humble chicken egg. We know (presumably non magical) eggs can be changed into Basilisks by the simple method of hatching it below a toad.

 

Sorry if this is slightly of topic but if you can transfigure animals which is not against the law of of transfiguration what happens if you try to kill the animal and then cook it. Would the animal return to whatever material it was before it was transfigured or would you have a usable carcass? And if so wouldn't this be a bypass to the law which doesn't transfigure food.

 

I thought the exception about creating food was that you couldn't conjure it or transfigure something into it directly. Just because we eat animals doesn't mean they count as food concerning transfiguration.

That said, I do believe transfiguration is permanent, which is one of the main distinctions between that branch and Charms, so transfiguring something into an animal, killing it, cooking it and eating it would be fine. Perhaps you just can't jump steps, like transfiguring a rock into a cooked steak rather than turning it into a cow, killing it, and cooking it first.

So, based on this, do you think a sufficiently skilled wizard or witch could transfigure some inanimate object into a magical creature like a Griffin or a Cerberus (at least the ones without 'active' magical abilities or talents like dragons and Phoenixes)?