Raptor jaw snapping

Originally posted to tumblr on July 10 2018. Reposted here for archiving of posts I want to keep.

[spoilers for all JP/JW movies, up to and including Fallen Kingdom]

This wonderful post by Feynites on how Owen has probably misunderstood his place in the raptors’ social group got me thinking more about how the events of Jurassic World, as well as what I remember of the events of Fallen Kingdom from my so far one two viewings, seemed from the raptors’ point of view. And I think this particular behavior found in both movies is a good insight into it.

The jaw snapping I’m talking about is when a raptor lunges her head forward, noticeably or only slightly, in a pecking motion (they are birds, after all), and bites the air, and it’s done towards another animal but more as a demonstration than a serious attempt for that particular bite to connect.

The thing Blue does at Owen in this moment here when he’s just gotten between her and prey (the worker who fell into the raptor paddock). Obviously an aggressive move, and Owen responds to this one from Blue with an also angry “Hey! What did I just say?”

So… what does this gesture from her mean about how much danger he’s in in this scene? It looks pretty scary for one. It’s mean to, of course, it’s a warning. What exactly is he being warned about?

Well, to put it in some context, I made note of all the other times the raptors do this in the movie, and they are these:

• Blue snaps at Charlie earlier in this scene, when Charlie is slow to follow Owen’s instructions. She lunges far enough at her she could have bitten Charlie’s neck if she wanted to, but Charlie doesn’t act threatened afterwards.

• Right after that, Echo, too, snaps at Charlie, who is being clumsy and smacks Echo on the head with her tail while turning around.

• It’s very quick and I initially missed it, but when Owen runs into the paddock to get between the raptors and the worker who fell in, right when he stops, Delta turns her head towards him and snaps her jaws. She does move her feet, too, to turn towards him fully, but she steps to the side instead of closer while snapping, and is still easily far enough she couldn’t have thought she’d catch any of him in that bite. The same is true of Blue’s snap at Owen soon after, when he directly addresses her, telling her to stand down. The raptors walk slowly towards Owen (and he backs away from them), but though Blue may take a step during her snap, it’s at the same pace she’s already walking, and she doesn’t take another step right after, still keeping enough distance from Owen neither can reach to touch the other.

• Right after the raptors hit the gate when they do charge at Owen, Delta, Charlie, and Blue snap their jaws, in that order. Delta’s is a bit hard to tell who it’s aimed at, but I’m guessing Blue who is right next to her, although it could also be at Charlie, past Blue who is leaning back to shake her head at the moment. Then when they’ve backed away from the gate a bit, Charlie walks past the both of them and snaps at Delta along the way. Blue snaps at Charlie’s back after that. More on that later:*

Dinosaur drama in the background. Don’t ever turn your back to the cage because you’ll miss it. (On another note, what Barry says to Owen in French here before being told “Yeah” and they both laugh, was “You should have let her eat him.”)

• When the raptors are released to track the Indominus, right when they start slowing down, a raptor that I think is Blue (after further investigation, I can see it’s actually Delta - Blue is at the front of the group) snaps at a raptor that I think is Echo (I’ll get to why**), which directs the raptor being snapped at to a different spot in the formation they run in (which according to the radar Barry looks at becomes a pretty neat rhombus.)

• After Echo jumps through the side window of the van Claire is driving and then falls onto the road, it looks like she snaps at Delta when she runs past, but on closer inspection she opens her mouth to make a sound at Delta instead, so not an example.

• On the other hand, when Echo joins Delta in chasing the van right after, she bumps into Delta when getting alongside her. Delta snaps at her for that, and they continue the chase.

• Delta snaps her jaws at Zach and Gray when she jumps into the back of the van, but it’s clearly in genuine attempt to bite them, and she just can’t quite reach that far, so it’s not an example of this behavior. Neither is what she does with the Dilophosaurus hologram, as she’s jumping towards it while snapping, and thought there was something to bite there.

• When the raptors have the humans surrounded and Owen reaches a hand towards Blue to take off her headset, she snaps at him at first.

And, that’s it. My conclusion is,

1. It’s a form of raptor-to-raptor communication. It’s a warning to cut that out, or just scolding a packmate for something you didn’t like, but it isn’t necessarily followed by violence, and usually isn’t.
   
   
2. That it’s directed at Owen means he is indeed considered pack, including in some pretty tense situations.
   
   Whether Barry is, is unclear, since we never see him interacting directly with the raptors while they’re unrestrained, except for Blue attacking him in the forest. For what it’s worth, what we do see is him spending time petting them to calm them when they’re in their muzzles, which they seem receptive to, as Delta and Blue’s reaction to Hoskins makes very clear what it looks like when they’re approached by someone unwanted while muzzled. And during said attack in the forest, when Barry has a clear shot at Blue, instead of shooting he says her name, and Blue not only reacts but stops attacking, probably only then recognizing him. He hasn’t worked with them for as long as Owen has, but he, too, seems to count as more worthy of respect than humans in general to them.
   
   
3. The snapping is usually done by an individual higher up in the pack hierarchy to one that’s lower in it, and exceptions to this rule mean the situation is not resolved at that one snap. How it goes from there, depends. The raptors’ order of age from oldest to youngest is Blue, Delta, Echo, and Charlie, which I think is also their order of who gets to scold whom, with Blue at the top.
   
   
4. Owen is indeed not the leader of the pack, because Blue, and Delta at least once, do this at him.

So what was up with the Gate Drama*? According to additional but official material, I forgot which, Charlie really, really likes Blue, for one. If Delta snapped at Blue there, I guess Charlie then told Delta to respect their awesome big sister who knows best. Blue snaps at poor Charlie for her trouble, because it’s not her job to put Delta in her place for that. It’s an exceptional situation, but I think that interpretation makes sense, and what goes down is hardly serious, because they’re sisters and get along. What did Delta get angry at Blue for? I’m guessing putting up with Owen getting between them and prey, which was pretty rude of him to do, from their point of view. And that was serious.

Basically what Owen did, though heroic from the human perspective, to the raptors was one pack member, and not even the leader, hoarding the kill all for himself. And then he talked back to Blue when she told him to share! The nerve of this guy! Owen thought Blue was challenging his authority by defying his telling her to leave the worker alone. In truth, to the raptors, the situation was Owen challenging Blue’s authority, which she felt increasingly compelled to reassert the more he defied her. There’s not really a solution there that would have made everyone happy because obviously the guy couldn’t really be let get eaten, but the “Hey! What did I just say?” that Owen might have thought helped de-escalate? I’m guessing did the opposite.

Was all of this a serious enough offense that the raptors tried to kill him? They did charge at him, and I think Blue knows Owen is not a raptor and is weak and squishy and easy to kill, but I guess there’s a chance it’s an example of some behavior just being instinctual enough to override that knowledge for a moment, because assuming the charge wasn’t simply a bluff to begin with, if Owen was a raptor, whatever they were planning to do to him might have been perfectly survivable.

Again according to additional official material, when the raptors were younger, Blue and Echo did have a pretty serious fight, which got physical enough it’s the reason Echo has a scar across her snout and a slightly misaligned lower jaw (**and the jaw’s the reason I think the raptor snapped at right before they confront the Indominus in the forest is Echo). It was, you guessed it, because Echo challenged Blue’s leadership of the pack. I’m sure both raptors got plenty of vet care afterwards, but depending on how much setting Echo’s jaw needed, I think in the wild, too, that would have been nowhere near a death sentence, especially with her pack protecting her while she heals. Still, blood was drawn, though it seems to be water under the bridge these days. Some things about pack hierarchy are a big deal to this pack, too.

Speaking of which, other raptor packs are also shown doing the snapping behavior.

Jurassic Park’s only example is when the raptor that I think is the one Muldoon refers to as The Big One follows Lex and Tim into the kitchen, and calls for the other raptors to join the hunt. One of the other two shows up, and The Big One snaps at her when she does. “What took you so long?” I’m guessing is a pretty accurate translation of that snap, and if I’ve identified the raptors correctly, the pack hierarchy detail holds true, too.

What differentiates the situation from Jurassic World’s raptor squad is the other raptor’s submissive reaction, which we see none of in JW. This doesn’t look like a happy family, and, well, remembering Muldoon’s account of how this pack came to be of the configuration and the size it is, and knowing the JP raptors were not raised and socialized together, it isn’t one. The JP pack are more like an example of the kind of putting unrelated adult wolves in the same space to form social groups they wouldn’t naturally form in the wild situation that led to the errorenous alpha theory about wolf packs, which are now increasingly widely understood to actually be families. That other raptor wouldn’t dream of snapping back at her pack leader, because that’d probably mean teeth at her throat in no time. To their credit, though, these raptors still do try to avenge each other when Rexy chomps down on one of them.

JP3 doesn’t have any examples. This pack seems pretty zen towards each other, and are also demonstrated being caring parents. They’re a family unit with multiple generations, living in the wild; a dinosaur version of that natural wolf pack. The jaw snapping behavior probably happens among them, too, but during the movie, we only meet mature adult raptors with the shared goal of retrieving their stolen eggs, while the JW pack are basically still a bunch of kids, who bicker like the siblings they are, and for most of the movie don’t have any particular clear goal to focus on instead (and probably have quite a bit of frustrated energy to vent by bickering, from being wild animals living in captivity in a paddock that I don’t think is nearly big enough for four animals their size).

The Lost World’s raptors on the other hand provide the most violent example in the series, because its one example of jaw snapping behavior escalates into a full on fight that may or may not lead to one of the raptors killing the other. At the very least it looks like it might soon, if not already on-screen. The raptors start by one falling onto the other, getting snapped at, and then each of them returning the gesture with one of their own every time with increasing aggression, until finally one of them (the one who fell) pounces on the other, at which point they don’t even notice their prey getting away anymore and just focus on mauling each other.

The Lost World novel does describe the raptors encountered in this part of Isla Sorna as particularly dysfunctional, with apparently no care for the pack’s younger members and a tendency for cannibalism even with other food readily available. But that’s the book, and the movie is not a direct adaptation. We don’t know this pack’s dynamics, and maybe this has simply been a long time coming for these two. This is a much larger pack than JW’s four so we don’t know these two raptors’ level of relation, either. In any case, neither of them backs down and breaks up the situation, so it gets all the way as far as it can.

Blue messing up Echo’s jaw seems amicable in comparison.

Does this answer whether the JW raptors tried to kill Owen when he got greedy with the best live prey they’d had so far? Not definitely, and even if they didn’t they could have killed him by accident. But the fact that Delta and Charlie can overstep their respective places in the hierarchy right after one pack member already did something pretty major to challenge Blue, and Blue both lets it slide and doesn’t have to watch her back for having done so says something about this pack’s willingness to stay on good terms, and not out of fear of each other.

Even when Blue allies herself with the Indominus, I’m not so sure killing Owen was something she was actually prepared to do. What we see is all the raptors looking directly at him (going by their headsets’ video feed) when the Indominus directs them to turn on the humans (though they don’t attack yet at that point), Charlie looking confused about what she’s supposed to do when she comes across Owen in the woods, Blue attacking Barry, the other human who’s been taking care of them (but it seems she didn’t know it was him when she did so), Blue chasing Owen’s motorcycle when he lures her away from Barry (would she have gone back to attacking, or left him alone anyway, though?), and, though Blue chases Owen, she doesn’t do so for long.

Claire has the raptors’ headsets’ video feed open on her screen when the movie cuts to them at the van. Charlie’s is blank since she is already dead at this point. Echo is running through the woods, and Delta, well, seems to be eating someone. Blue’s screen shows Owen driving away, and soon after we get to this shot, Blue just stops running and lets Owen get away. It’s not to just go back to attacking Barry, we see at the end of the movie he survived, with little to no injuries.

In front of the visitor center they definitely herd Owen, Claire, and the kids in the same manner the JP pack surrounds the humans to kill them, there’s no question it’s a hostile confrontation. Whether it would have ended in treating all the humans as prey if it came to that, I’m not sure, but I wonder how sure the raptors were of that, either, and whether they were at all hoping it would come to that.

So let’s go back to that last example of jaw snapping in JW.

The snap is pretty half-hearted, and Blue barely even moves her head forward when she does it. Owen doesn’t withdraw his hand, and replies to her in a calm voice like she’s the scared one needing reassuring.

Which, I think she is. From Blue’s point of view, Owen betrayed her first by co-operating with the InGen assholes who used her and her sisters as tracking dogs, even though we know he had no choice. He’s her dad and he should have protected her and taken her side. Showing trust in this scene as he does, is to tell her it’s okay, he still cares, he’s still one of them. Blue’s body language actually becomes less hostile already the instant Owen puts down his gun, but she still snaps a bit to let him know it’s not quite so easy, and she needs the extra bit of reassurance to forgive him, which, please give her a reason to do, this fighting seemed like a good idea at the time but it got out of hand and is no fun. She wants to be family again.

…And then he leaves her alone on the island for three years.

No wonder this is the greeting he gets at their reunion.

But you know what, inbetween the screeches and growls, she’s still expressing her annoyance at him by jaw snapping. Even at this point, to her he’s still pack. I don’t think there’s ever been a time she would have wanted him to be anything else.