Why is it the responsibility of wizards to hide magical creatures? Surely dragons, unicorns and crups have been around for as long as their 'normal' counterparts, so what makes these creatures so alarmingly different so that they have to be hidden away at all?

Its just a thought, but I feel that hiding magical creatures and other intelligent races away from muggles during the implementation of the Statute of Secrecy must have made an impossible task much, much harder.

If anyone has any thoughts, then feel free to chime in.

 

Presumably, before the SoS, it didn't matter if Muggled saw such creatures (other than the likelihood of being killed), but when the SoS was implemented, having dragons and unicorns around is a pretty good sign that magic of some sort is real. It's not a massive leap from there to 'wizards and witches are real', which leads into the reasons the SoS was implemented.

Also, it might have been felt that allowing dragons etc to roam free when the Muggles no longer knew about/believed in them (on the whole) would lead to unacceptable casualties.

 

To be honest, I'm still a bit confused at what constitutes a "Magical" creature. I get some of the more sentient ones like goblins, elves and even Dementors but why is a Bowtruckle a Magical creature but not a Venus Fly Trap? Why is a Crup a "Magical" creature but not any other dog.

And what makes a Dragon inherently magic? The fact that it breathes a flammable gas out of it's mouth as opposed to it's arse? If we'd never been introduced to fantasy dragons we would probably call it a Dinosaur instead of Magic.

My opinion? When the wizard-muggle split happened, the wizards took all the "Useful" magical creatures with them. The ones that can be used for potions, for guarding stuff or even the ones more suited for companionship for Wizards.

 

That's not a bad idea. My main problem with the term is with how it applies to centaurs, goblins and merpeople. By all accounts, they are simply intelligent beings who would have probably had their own relationships with humans. The fact that wizards decided to hide all of them, every intelligent race aside from muggles, must have created some serious tension.

 

Well, we know that magic is not based in physics. And we know that certain creatures do overtly magical things that are not based on physics. A phoenix for example does a buttload of stuff that is clearly of magical nature. So it would follow that all magical creatures use magic in some way as to defy physics.

Dragons for example could fly with a smaller wingspan then necessary for something of that size and weight. Or produce flame "from nothing" instead of producing some form of gas. And that's not even getting into the properties of it's blood that we know are magical.

Now the real question is, how do you know if something uses magic or physics to do its thing? Especially as Wizards were the ones cataloging creatures and plants and not muggles.

There could actually be an interesting story in there about various creatures -- the platypus for an obvious example -- and weird phenomena that, while being magical, are well known by muggles. They slipped through the initial classification and by the time someone found out it would be a far to great of an effort to obliviate everyone in the know. So instead there is a crack team of witches and wizards employed by the ICW to make sure everybody keeps believing this egg-laying mammal with poison glands and a duck beak is a completely normal and defensively not magical creature.

 

If the wizards depend on muggles for food, it would benefit them to keep the farmers from being killed by the dragons and trolls and what not(In fairy tales dragons have a history of stealing cattle for food, and they didn't ask nicely). Magical creatures killing muggles would probably lead to the muggles suspecting the existence of the wizarding world, but also they would be trying to find ways to kill the creatures, the better to protect themselves. I know it's the fantasy genre and magic always beats everything, but it borders on stupidity if dragons can survive a relativistic bomb. Additionally, if dragons exist as we understand them from fairy tales, they can be killed with regular swords, so it's realistic that muggles could basically drive the magical creatures to extinction. Wizards passing the Statute of Secrecy probably foresaw Mao types who would attempt to exterminate all the sparrows and spiders in China, to disastrous consequences. If he knew about Red Caps or Pixies or whatever's more endemic to his own land, he'd be getting rid of them too. If there's a real threat of extinction, you would think the creatures would hide themselves, yes, but they weren't informed of the Statute(except possibly goblins and merpeople), and there really aren't good places to hide without magical aid. Even if a dragon flies to the most remote mountain in the world, there's going to be some idiot hiker who just happens to see it while it's sleeping.

 

I think that it may be more likely that Muggles would domesticate certain animals like dragons or flying horses, before driving them to extinction. Either way I suppose that it would be in the interests of wizards to protect certain animals, if only to for their utility in wand making.

 

It could be that there are magical creatures that still roam amongst the muggles, simply because isolating them all would be either impractical or catastrophic. Bumblebees come to mind.

 

I suppose so. I mean, if magical creatures existed from the start then they wouldn't be considered magical, per say, simply animals with peculiar quirks.