The FBI views animal abuse as a very serious crime.
They track it right along with homicide, arson, and assault, because “there is overwhelming evidence that [animal abuse] is linked to crimes against people, including violent crimes and domestic violence.”
Rose Tyler. I was going to take you to so many places. Barcelona. Not the city, Barcelona, the planet Barcelona. You’d love it. Fantastic place. They’ve got dogs with no noses. Imagine how many times a day you end up telling that joke and it’s still funny. Then why can’t we go? Maybe you will. And maybe I will. But not like this.
Fact: the reason that turning someone into a frog results in an amphibian that’s capable of reason and speech rather than a regular dumb animal isn’t because evil wizards are habitually merciful; it’s because it’s illegal to curse someone in any way that would render them unable to dispute the curse’s terms in a court of law, and the Laws of Magic are very particular about enforcing that!
This is also why curses that directly incapacitate or kill are invariably set to take effect gradually, or after long a delay, or at the very least under circumstances that cannot immediately be brought about: the curse’s creator must allow the target adequate time to prepare their defence. They are not, however, under any obligation to actually inform the target of their rights in this respect, a fact that many unscrupulous sorcerers take full advantage of.
One poorly understood consequence of this arrangement is that children who’ve been orphaned and not subsequently adopted or made wards of the state are effectively immune to curses, as they cannot defend themselves and lack a guardian capable of mounting a legal defence on their behalf. Furthermore, should a child by some happenstance become guardianless while under the effects of an existing curse, those effects will immediately be suspended until such time as they either acquire a guardian or come of age. This edge case is likely the source of various accounts of terrible region-spanning curses laying low the region’s entire adult population while leaving the children curiously unaffected.
(One might naturally expect this to mean that children with guardians can freely be targeted by directly incapacitating curses, as their condition has no bearing on the practicability of a legal defence. Sadly, this is not case, because when you’re an evil wizard nothing is fair.)
This feels like some sort of justification for the common use of illegal teen and pre-teen hero labor in the dismantling of Evil Sorcerous Organizations.
If you’re wondering whether any ostensibly benevolent sage or high priest has ever deliberately weaponised the fact that guardianless minors are effectively immune to curses, you are absolutely correct to wonder that.
(Though it’s not as widespread as you might think, because you have to be very careful not to accidentally become the minor in question’s de facto guardian in the process – the Laws of Magic recognise the validity of constructive adoption, even when you’d rather they didn’t!)
How does this interact with the high mortality rate of teenage heroes’ mentors and guardians?
And thus does evil forge the instruments of its own destruction, for evil is dumb.
