Index · creature · book 3
Hippogriff
Half horse, half eagle. Proud, rideable if you bow first, and the center of a third-year injustice.
A hippogriff expects manners. You wait, you bow, you do not insult it because your friends are watching. The care-of-creatures lesson that introduces them is also a lesson in how fast a school rumor becomes a hearing. One animal is punished for a human’s arrogance.
Canon fact: hippogriffs are proud, not tame, and a bow is the protocol the books insist on. The trial around one of them is plot, flagged here only as the reason the creature matters past the lesson.