I AM SCREAMING AND CRYING
Oh god, my ovaries. Chris Pratt + Baby Raptors is too much. I can’t survive that.
This alone makes me excited for the movie.
O_O
Oh my gods, did they imprint on him? Is that what the story is going to be, that Chris Pratt is Surrogate Velociraptor Mom?
Something like that. Its implied that he is some kind of raptor behaviorlist and he has this pack of raptors that he works with in the park. When the ” wild” dinps escape he gears up and is gonna have his pack help him and stuff.
Any doubts I might have had about seeing this movie vanished now that I know I will get to see Chris Pratt saving the day with the help of friendly velociraptors 😀
We’ve finally reached that stage in the franchise where the “monsters” from the first one team up with the humans to take down a bigger threat. Delightful ❤
It had to happen eventually 😀
And just look at how cute these little bb velociraptors are here…I am pleased they no longer want to eat us 😀
That’s not entirely true, I think. They really didn’t know what not to eat in the first movies, so they just ate animals (which humans are a part of) and humans just happened to be in the area at the time.
In other words, they may eat other humans, but these raptors in specific won’t ever eat Chris Pratt because he raised them.
Actually, THAT is not entirely true. The raptors in the original movies were highly intelligent creatures. For example, in the first movie, they set a trap for their former captor, figured out how to use door handles, and defended their pack members when attacked up to and including to their own deaths (re; the t-rex attacking them in the building at the end). In the third movie (I think), when their eggs are stolen, they relentlessly pursue the person who stole the eggs and not only do they appear to be aware that these creatures took the eggs, they appear to be able to differentiate between WHICH human took the eggs. They organize a rescue party to retrieve the eggs AND strike a wordless accord with Dr. Grant. They accept him giving the eggs back unharmed and in return they do not harm him or those with him.
Taking all of that into consideration, we have to assume that at the very least, if they can differentiate between individual humans, they can differentiate between humans and prey animals.
Now for the REALLY INTERESTING PART.
What I want to know is… are these raptors imprinted, trained, socialized, or domesticated?
Domestication is something that would have had to occur over generations of raptors. Much like they did in the original Russian domesticated fox study, researchers would have started with a group of raptors, and then when they bred, they would take the babies which showed the most natural affinity for liking humans and breed them together. This would be repeated over and over again until the researchers ended up with raptors that were not just tame, but naturally likely to befriend humans. This would have had to be a process begun by Hammond in order for the timeline to work out in favor of this theory (bearing in mind that reptiles and large birds often take several years to reach sexual maturity and a safe size to breed). This would result in raptors that are inclined to be human-friendly if they are properly socialized, which leads me to…
Socializing animals is what most people do with companion animals. Your average house cat, dog, caged bird, small animal, etc is considered “domesticated” and has been socialized to some degree. This process involves common/frequent exposure to humans at a young age, and can be done with both domesticated and wild animals, though successful results with wild animals are, of course, much fewer and generally depend on the intelligence of the animal (think dolphins, elephants, etc) or whether they were captive-born (think zoos). The more human interaction an animal has, the better socialized it will be, and the friendlier it will tend to be toward other humans (which may be the case in this story). Domesticated animals which are NOT socialized at a young age are often difficult to work with and can even revert to a “feral” state (which is almost definitely what happened in the first movies). Domesticated (and usually intelligent wild) animals which ARE properly socialized can then be trained, which leads me to…
Training animals generally requires that they are either domesticated and well-socialized, or that they are intelligent/captive-bred (though I’m sure there are exceptions). Most training involves adapting behaviors that the animal already does by reward systems- when they do the behavior you want (or close to it), they get a reward. They can also be taught to adapt training to various situations. For example, when you teach a dog to shake, this behavior can also be useful for trimming nails. People train animals to do a HUGE range of things, everything from painting pictures to surfing to being aid animals for humans. Indeed, they could be trained to run alongside motorbikes through fields. After all, just like in that movie Fly Away Home, there are birds that will follow their human flockmates in this manner, after imprinting, which leads me to….
Imprinting (specifically filial imprinting) is something that is mainly documented in birds (which, as Dr. Grant hypothesizes in the first movie, dinosaurs are the ancestors of). Saying that a bird imprints on “the first creature they see” is actually a misnomer, though it’s fairly close. Imprinting actually takes place over the course of the first day of life, specifically in the first ~15 hours. It is independent of any behavior, meaning that to begin the process all one has to do is be present (and appear alive in some way, by movement) for that critical period. Being alive actually isn’t a requirement- birds have imprinted on inanimate objects that are made to move (Konrad Lorenz actually imprinted birds on a box trundling around a toy train track).
However, despite that it doesn’t require behavior to form, imprinting does require reinforcement to maintain past a short period. Animals imprinted on humans will always be people-friendly, even if socialization is discontinued. Imprinted birds are very easy to train, as they tend to copy behavior performed by the parent. They will follow their “parent” everywhere, trying to be close to them. Even after they are adults, they desire the parent’s attention all the time. They also tend to believe that they are the same as the creature that raised them, meaning that if a human raises them, they believe they are human, even to the point of seeking human mates over mates of their own species (for example, zebra finches tend to try to attract mates that look like the female who raised them, regardless of what their own colors are).
I raise birds as a hobby. My chickens, the most domesticated of the group, show no fear of humans without much socialization at all. The turkeys, slightly less domesticated, need to be worked with a little more but they become easy to train. The peafowl, the least domesticated of any of my birds, are very difficult to socialize to the point where they are people-friendly. However, if I’m willing to hatch them myself and put in the work, they imprint really well:
I imagine that, raptors being the ancestors of birds and genetic manipulation being a factor at the facility which created them, you could absolutely have imprinted raptors that would stay closest to the one that hatched and raised them, but that would also hang out with other humans because they believe that the humans around them are a part of their family group. Which of course means that they will also be willing to fight to the death to protect that family group, just like that raptor in the first movie did.
And that’s your lesson for the day on imprinting velociraptors!
This was such an amazing post omg
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