Well played.

 

Sadly, law seems to get into the way of the fun here.

 

I think you may have a very distorted view of hunting.

Hunting is a functional thing in many parts of the world including in the UK. You need to keep various pests down to protect crop and stock. Very few people ride horses when hunting these days. If you need mobility you drive a 4x4, a quad, or a trail bike.

 

The Weasley have a hunting game, They didn't realy perform the kiling, but they are protecting their garden from Gnome. Wizard must have some repellent magic against rodent, etc... (like mugles) so this must be for the sports.

 

Ah, but the question was 'how would wizards hunt,' not 'how would wizards hunt magical creatures?'

(Of course, Bellatrix didn't kill that fox for sport or even out of cruelty, she killed it because she was an insane, paranoid, bitch, who thought it might be a spying animagus. Still, the point stands.)

Fuck the police aurors?

I bet you could get an exemption if you're a rich, influential, mofo, like Lucius.
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LeadVonE's "Dodging Prison and Stealing Witches" has the magical elites engaging in a hunt, in the vein of the traditional fox hunt, only with animagi as the prey.

Of course, they also weren't hunting them to kill them, so it doesn't really apply to this thread.

Incidentally, the prey animagi were James, Sirius, two Parkinsons (presumably Pansy's father and uncle), Luna's mother, and an Ogden: Stag, dog, two boars, flying squirrel, and grey wolf, respectively.

They still rode regular horses, and of course used 'safe' short range stunners to bag their prey, as opposed to lethal spells.

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Hagrid is magical and he uses a crossbow. Then again, he's a half giant (you've gotta wonder if that thing requires giant strength to operate) with a broken wand and a truncated magical education, so it may be that he has no choice but to hunt with the crossbow instead of with magic.

 

In Order of the Phoenix, Sirius tells Harry about an aunt who wanted to make muggle hunting legal, so for some wizards there is no difference.

" [...] and Araminta Meliflua... cousin of my mother's... tried to force through a Ministry Bill to make Muggle-hunting legal [...]’” - Sirius Black

 

Again, I think you may have a distorted view of hunting.

Hunting foxes from horseback with dogs is really rare even in the UK. Owning and looking after a horse plus hunting dogs is a very expensive past time and is almost exclusively the past time of the rich "old boys". It's far more common for farmers to go out with a rifle and shoot foxes because they prey on lambs.

 

That's not hunting, that's just killing things. If a dangerous animal appears in my yard and I kill it, am I hunting? No. Hunting is an activity marked out by a pursuit of some kind, by the activities of tracking and chasing. Not all deliberate killing of living things is hunting (and not all hunting ends in a kill).

 

Well I guess every hunter in Australia has been doing it wrong for a century.

 

I have to say I kind of agree with Taure on this. To me hunting means going into the woods looking, and waiting for an animal to come around. Killing an animal in my yard is not hunting it's pest control.

 

I wonder how effective the killing curse would be against magical animals like dragons or the basilisk

 

Presumably if you're hunting the animal, it'd be considered unsporting the point of other hunters excluding you for using it. I've never been hunting, but I'm assuming there is a cultural thing about not using a weapon that's stupidly overpowered for the hunt? Also its probably frowned upon, even if its not actually illegal, to be throwing around a curse that's unforgivably illegal to use on humans.