just watched jurassic park and from a meta perspective im thinking sadly about how the behavior the carnivores display is way more indicative (at least to me) of wanting to play and lacking stimulation in their lives than actually wanting to eat the human characters. and they got so so demonized for it
JP dinosaur behavior analysis with a healthy dose of headcanon included from someone who doesnt know much about behavioral science. for funsies
ok so first of all lets start with the t rex. her very first moment is the goat leg ending up on the car, but we can see in the next shot that she is very capable of swallowing the goat whole. so how did that leg get there? given evidence that t. rexes were likely social creatures, i like to imagine that the leg on the car was more “here you go have part of my meal because you’re small” for the humans
next is her communication. i want to look at one specific thing, which was actually the thing that prompted the post
to me, that certainly looks like eye pinning. eye pinning is a behavior in birds that signals high stimulation. here’s what it looks like in a bird
it can be positive or negative, but in this case it’s probably not negative, because there’s nothing forcing the rex to stay there. if she wanted to leave the situation she could hit the bricks
the continual roaring also sort of suggests play behavior to me. there’s not really any sense in making a shitload of noise at your prey (unless you’re trying to scare them out of cover, but we know she doesn’t need to do that because we see she’s strong enough to just break into the car) so, especially because they keep screaming, that reads way more like “im making noises and they’re making noises back ^w^” then it does as trying to intimidate prey for some reason
play behavior also makes sense because we know, canonically, she’s crazy understimulated. alan grant says as much when he mentions that they aren’t feeding her in a way that promotes hunting behavior. the way she noses at the jeep and spins it really just looks more like curious interaction than anything, as well as all the chasing people she does
next, the raptors. their really famous scene is the kitchen, but first let’s establish some facts about them. we know from muldoon and what we’re shown that:
- they’re smart enough to use one of their own as a distraction for flanking maneuvers
- they’re good at problem solving enough to wait until the electric fences are turned off to systematically test them for vulnerabilities
- they’re absurdly fast. “60 mph on open ground” fast
- they are absolutely not in a big enough enclosure
- they’re not fed in a way that promotes hunting behavior either
so when you put all this information together and then look at the kitchen scene, i don’t believe for even one second that the “hide behind the counter” routine is fooling those two raptors for any time at all. that entire sequence of loudly scrambling around the kitchen while something that can keep pace with a cheetah pretends it can’t catch you? yeah that makes WAY more sense as play behavior than it does hunting, especially since we see numerous times that there are many things on the island easier to catch and eat than a bunch of skinny humans (this goes for the rex, too!)
the bit with the noises is also true here. more true, if anything. muldoon tells us the raptors are ambush predators, so why on earth would they get into a hunting ground and then risk scaring their prey off with the loud barking calls? “hi we’re here come out and play” is a much more sensible use of a call loud enough to hurt a human’s ears from across a room in that situation
in conclusion: damnit john your girls are bored as fuck. give them a horse ball or a frozen pumpkin stuffed with meat or something
