Dinosaur tranquilizing thoughts

(spoilers for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and The Lost World: Jurassic Park. TW: needles)

I've seen a few people express confusion about how Rexy was captured during Isla Nublar's evacuation - how did they get her in the cage when she's obviously not even tranquilized since she's making noise? That part was never all that confusing to me (where exactly did they capture her, though, and where did she go after crushing that poor Carnotaurus? Where was she when the pyroclastic flow Owen was apparently immune to reached the cliff? Who knows).

Sedatives work gradually, and during that time animals are still able to do many of the things they normally do, but with decreasing coordination. Maybe the humans herded her to falling onto the floor of the cage when she lost her balance, and put the rest of the cage together around her. That she's vocalizing doesn't mean she's fully awake.

Pictured: a tranquilized Triceratops, not being silent.

She may also be already waking up from the initial dose and is about to get a boost when they get her to the docks. We see the hunters in TLW have trouble with knowing a safe dosage for tranquilizing a T. rex (since Roland originally intended to shoot it dead and had to improvise), and they ended up almost killing the male rex as a result. Zia points out the risk of that in Fallen Kingdom, too, while they’re about to leave to find Blue.

Dr. Sarah Harding: Why the hell wasn't it tranquilized?
Some guy: It was, Roland hit it with two darts of concentrated carfentanil. It was over 10 milligrams.
Dr. Sarah Harding: 10 milligrams? That'd put it in a coma!
Guy: It stopped breathing, so we gave it naltrexone to counteract the effects. But we didn't know how much to give it.
Dr. Sarah Harding: You administered an antagonist without knowing the proper dosage?

Dr. Zia Rodriguez: These are powerful sedatives. One too many, and she could have respiratory failure.

I assume they have access to data for how much Rexy weighed while she was at the park, as traquilizing her was explicitly the plan, and they took into consideration she’d likely have lost weight since then, and rather risked giving her too little at first instead of too much.

But that also reminds me of another part of Fallen Kingdom.

As established, tranquilizing an animal is not an on/off switch, which is why people who know what they’re doing while handling wildlife know to still stay away from a dangerous animal for some time after they’ve administered the sedative. This is also one of the things that show Wheatley does not actually know shit about appropriate handling of animals, or the Indoraptor dropping to the floor right after the second dart would have seemed suspicious to him and he wouldn't have been fooled by the fainting performance. But, in order to fake fainting in the first place, apparently the Indoraptor does know what is "supposed to" happen when he's hit with a tranquilizer dart.

Part of the explanation could be the scene that got cut out of the movie at some point, where someone went into the Indoraptor's cage to fix a lamp and never got out when it turned out the dinosaur wasn't sufficiently sedated. The scene would have acted as foreshadowing for the scene with Wheatley, to show two darts aren't enough.

I don't know how exactly the scene was going to go, I'm pretty sure it was never even filmed in full. I think it might have been more a character recounting the incident to someone else instead of us getting to see it. But if I'm going to take a guess, administering the sedative was done that time by someone who knows how it should be done: they gave him one dart's worth of sedative, waited to see it wasn't enough, and gave him another, then waited again. That would have given the Indoraptor time to experience the effects of the sedative, even if it wasn't enough to incapacitate him, so he knew what getting hit with a dart like that does to him, and guessed the humans wanted the effects to be stronger.

It's also remarkable he understood the purpose was not to kill him. Playing dead is something animals can understand as a defensive strategy, but in the movie the Indoraptor makes no effort to hide that he's still breathing.

As the deleted scene is deleted, the explanation for things that were left in the movie can't rely on it, but we can still guess he may have been sedated before, probably for some kind of medical procedure or another. And, he probably recognizes a gun by appearance. Not sure if he's seen one being fired before - the gun with the laser and sound signal he's familiar with, but with that gun, the Indoraptor himself is the ammo, so there's not necessarily need for him to have seen it shoot bullets. Then again, if Indoraptors are intended to be used in combat, you'd probably want to desensitize them to gunfire enough that your fancy attack dino doesn't get startled by someone on your side firing their gun where the dino can hear it. So it's possible he knows guns shoot tangible things and not just light and sound, and expects something is going to fly out of that barrell at him when it's aimed at him.

(Shouldn't he seem more worried about it in that case? Does he know his scales are bulletproof? Well, whether or not he does know, there's not much he can do in a cage where there's barely enough room for him to turn around and nothing to hide behind. And just how "bulletproof" his scales are is questionable - they might not be so everywhere on him, and just because the bullets don't cause as much damage as they otherwise would doesn't mean they just bounce off of him like he's Superman or something. And of course tranquilizer darts wouldn't stick to anything either if even bullets don't.)

When Wheatley shoots him and he notices it's little darts that barely hurt, either he has been sedated with a tranquilizer gun before so he knows what's up, or if he was small enough when it happened that they could just use a syringe, he still guesses this was not supposed to be immediately lethal.

I think he actually mostly watches Wheatley's reactions to what he does, and is just really good at reading humans. Wheatley doesn't look too shocked at that the dinosaur he just shot is still standing, but he raises his gun again, and the moment he does that is when the Indoraptor starts behaving like the sedative is taking effect, because that's the moment he understands exactly what the human expects to happen. And if he has been tranquilized with a gun before, that's also the moment he understands that this human doesn't know how this is supposed to work and is probably going to fall for a bit of trickery. He waits and listens, and hears Wheatley step closer while he is clearly breathing, so he knows he is expected to be asleep, not dead.

The graceful twirl he does in falling to the floor is a bit much, but he knows he is supposed to fall over and be unresponsive, because he has probably experienced enough of the effects before that it has happened to him for real. If the deleted scene is a thing that took place, he was probably more than a bit dizzy from the sedative during those events, just not enough that he couldn't still get his jaws around a human standing too close.

He seems to have shaken off the two darts from his neck while falling, possibly before they had completely emptied. Which could have been deliberate, too. I'm sure he'd rather not get to a point where he has trouble staying on his feet if he can help it.

And he seems to have found this experience very fun, because he repeats it when Owen shoots him.

"Blood! Blood! And... death."

That time he doesn't even need to, like he does here to lure Wheatley into opening his cage. He could have just ignored the shots (to some extent, at least - again, I'm pretty sure they still hurt and probably even do damage) and attacked Owen right away, but instead he bothered to pretend to be dead for a moment. It was kind of counterproductive, even, as it gave Blue time to make it to the room before he'd managed to bite Owen's head off. But I guess he considered it too hilarious not to do.