Raptor obedience thoughts

(Spoilers for Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom)

Eli Mills about the Indoraptor: And thanks to Owen Grady's research, it follows human command.

That's obviously very false advertizing if he's talking about the prototype, but it's pretty baseless of an assumption even if he means the Indoraptor project in general, and the future versions they haven't created yet. Because drawing the conclusion that raptors can be made to obey humans from the raising and training of Blue and her sisters is just incorrect. They never followed human command, either.

That's what I recently claimed in one of my update commentaries for Collision, at least, so elaborating a bit on that topic.

I could see Mills twisting the facts in his sales speech, but he would have to believe this part of what he's saying in order for the project to seem worth financing to him. He's not an expert on the animals themselves, of course, and doesn't care to be - so long as the lab's doing their job he doesn't need to know exactly how it works. So this misinterpretation of data is kind of on Dr. Wu, then.

And I guess it's not out of character for him. Dr. Henry Wu is a genius at his work as a geneticist, but he's always had an even higher opinion of his ability to keep every part of his work under control, even when it keeps backfiring (though not the most at himself, so far). Surely this time nothing unexpected will happen and ruin everything. A wonderful drug, that hubris.

 

Dr. Wu: We control their chromosomes. It's really not that difficult.

It's not a trait exclusive to him as a character, of course; humans presuming they can control nature instead of respecting it for what it is is one of the central themes of the series. So it doesn't come out of nowhere that humans would now presume that just because they've raised a clutch of Velociraptors interested in interacting with humans socially rather than only seeing us as food, they've created or are well on their way to creating ones that are subservient to humans.

 

Barry: What if they decide they wanna be in control?

Hoskins: Then we remind them who is. We terminate the rogues.

I'd say maybe Dr. Wu has been taking Hoskins's word on how the I.B.R.I.S. project is going a little too much, but Owen doesn't view the raptor pack he has raised completely differently, either. He respects them more and even loves them, but he still sees himself at the top of a chain of command. Part of that I'm sure is his military background, which I could see feeling to him kind of applicable to his current situation of raising creatures whose life is at least in some ways inherently violent. You know, the concept of a military leader being "like a father to his men" and all that. The only similarity the raptors see there, however, is that they view Owen and Barry as parental figures. Despite their names, who financed their creation, any of his experience in the navy that Owen brings to his training them, and the fact that their way of life includes killing things, the raptors are not a fighter unit. They're just four unruly, young adult siblings, who are willing to consider input from all of two (2) humans, whom they consider authority figures only as much as an adult animal generally views their parents. Owen's not their "alpha", he's just dad, and the raptors have fledged the nest a while ago by now.

Delta, Echo, and Charlie listen to Blue more than they listen to Owen, because Blue knows better how to be a raptor on account of that she actually is one, and they follow Owen's instructions because Blue sees those as worth taking into consideration. The moment they disagree with what he wants them to do, they'll refuse. Like he says even at their introduction scene, it's a "good day" we're seeing. The raptors humor him when they feel like it.

When he confronts them for the first time in years in the same space and puts himself between them and something they want, the reason the raptors don't hurt him isn't that he told them not to authoritatively enough. They never wanted to hurt him in the first place. Blue acts threatening and scary, but what we're witnessing is an argument, and so long as the raptors love Owen, they're never going to follow through on that threat.

 

Barry: Owen, no!
Also Barry, seconds later: *goes in after him*

 

And Owen's bravery in that scene gets much attention, but an underappreciated feat of heroism is that Barry puts himself in just as much danger, as he, too, goes in the entrance cage while the gate is up. There is nothing keeping the raptors from running past Owen and attacking him except for the guys with the taser guns that might or might not be able to shoot in time. Echo could have pretty much snuck in without anyone noticing before she's already crawled under the gate. But attacking Owen and Barry is not what they want to do, so they don't. They let dads have the paddock worker because trying to take him from them by force could hurt them by accident and they don't want that, but they need to at least get to communicate that they're pretty pissed off about it.

 

Barry at Hoskins who is bothering Delta to pay attention to him: She looks at what she wants. Usually what she wants to eat.

I think in some ways Barry understands the raptors better than Owen does. He doesn't seem to have any illusions about the raptors obeying humans, even Owen and him, and he seems to keep a bit more distance to them emotionally, so he takes their relationship with him for what they show it to be, rather than what he tries to tell them and himself it is. It's not one with mutual trust, because Barry definitely doesn't trust the raptors. Though I think he would not be incorrect to trust them not to intentionally hurt him, I also think it's entirely sensible for him not to count on it, and especially not to trust them to behave themselves outside of captivity enough for him to get carried away and actually kind of like riding through the jungle with them despite the context. But it is a relationship where he can't bring himself to shoot Blue in self-defense, and where saying her name and letting her know it's him that she's attacking causes her to stop.

 

Any seeming obedience from the raptors is due to their not wanting their two (2) humans to get hurt, in a way including the occasional tricks they were willing to perform at the paddock, because, well, "dad wants us to jump? Fine, let's jump, he'll be sad if we don't". If anything, the events of the two JW movies out so far would indicate Blue does not respond well at all to authoritarian behavior, and will just return any aggression directed at her. Instead, the times she lets Owen near and acts the friendliest towards him is when he's calm and reassuring, and respects her choice whether to interact with him. She's not his pet or subordinate, and takes offense to being treated like she is.

 

To focus for a bit on the scene in Fallen Kingdom where Owen throws a treat at Blue, and instead of catching and eating it, she growls at him for it, I think that's a good example of both her not wanting to be treated like someone's puppy dog, and also of that raising an extremely intelligent and social but also extremely dangerous wild animal as a human imprint was an irresponsible thing to do and has given her expectations about her relationship with Owen that I think are both difficult to accomodate in practice and unfair on both the human and the dinosaur. I think she's actually a bit offended that Owen is afraid of her. She might have accepted that treat if he had offered it from his hand. Which isn't to say it would have been smart for him to do so; I wouldn't trust her to be able to eat it without biting me, either. But by raptor logic it would make sense to her that now that they're in the same space and not separated by fences like they were during feedings at the paddock, dad should trust her after everything they've been through, and hand her the food directly, which is what a normal raptor parent would do, if he's going to insist on feeding her like she's a baby who hasn't caught her own food for years by now.

And so, throwing the treat at her just comes across as condescending, without the reassuring aspect of at least being babied by a parent, since the parent-child bond is the only context in which she accepts him having any power over her, and she doesn't get to choose whether to approach the treat. How rude. Maybe putting it on the ground and letting her take it from there if she wants would have been an acceptable compromise - keeping a safer distance, but making the treat a gift (like a raptor parent bringing food for an older nestling that can already eat independently, perhaps) instead of an order (to catch the food or get smacked in the face by the food).

In the long run, yes, getting an animal to see humans as parents would get the animal to want to cooperate enough to take orders from people just for the sake of doing what you want it to do, but by that I mean domesticating a species, through maybe thousands of years of selective breeding. Raising an individual wild animal to imprint on you just gets you a confused wild animal that's both unreleasable into the wild and dangerous to humans, because it's still a wild animal, just one that has no more respect for you than it would have for a conspecific, which might be zero. Domesticating Velociraptors and Velociraptor hybrids is nowhere near done, it hasn't even started.

The little seeming obedience humans manage to get out of the Indoraptor prototype is also pretty nonexistent, as we actually never see him being told to do something he didn't already want to do. Kill that human? Which one, doesn't matter, he was already on board with treating them as prey. He's not obeying because he respects the authority of his handlers or wants to make them happy, and the sound signal isn't mind control; if he was given a target he for some reason didn't want to hurt, he would most likely just refuse. He's probably been trained to associate the sound trigger with reward or lack of punishment, or the sound literally causes him pain and he's learned it stops when he does the thing they want, but the moment he has more reason not to obey, he's not going to, and the person holding the laser pointer had better stay at a safe distance because there's a more efficient and permanent way, too, of making the sound stop.

 

 

I doubt this was plan A or even plan B for how to direct him, because why have a dinosaur as your ammo when you can just shoot with a regular gun any target you can point a laser at. They didn't make the dinosaur to have a use for their gun, they built the gun to have at least some way of controlling their unexpectedly uncooperative dinosaur. I'd say the prototype is exactly what they should have expected, though. Not even just because the poor creature doesn't seem to have been treated in a way that would have given him any reason to trust and bond with his handlers, but because the source on that they can make an obedient raptor in the first place is so questionable. Even our "tamest" raptor Blue doesn't fit that description - if anything, she thinks Owen is her sidekick instead of the other way around. But holding a monster's leash is a tempting power fantasy.