Quote from: Vertigo on Dec 03, 2014, 09:12:53 PM
Corvids match 'higher' mammals for problem solving intelligence, and parrots and hornbills have highly developed emotional reasoning too. Hell, you can train a pigeon to deliver letters.
Most predatory animals can be trained to at least a degree. When filming Jaws, the Taylors were able to train the great whites to always approach on the sunny side of the boat, for filming purposes. Lemon sharks have been trained to press buttons in order to get food.
Furthermore, even apex predators like tigers and wolves can be imprinted to treat people like family members if they're hand-reared from an early age by a skilled trainer.
Add JP3's conceit that the raptors are "smarter than primates", and JW's trained raptors don't strain my credulity at all. As with a 'tame' lion or wolf, you'd just have to be sure they're kept away from untrained civilians, and as a trainer, you'd have to spend lots of time with them every day to reinforce the 'family' bond, and your position in their hierarchy.
Strictly speaking many of your mentioned examples are not fully true or thought to the end.
Sure, through behavioural studies you can modify a Great White Sharks behaviour to accomodate certain settings. Like the Taylors did. That being said, you can also swim to those Sharks without them eating you, that doesn't mean at all that you've "trained" them, you are simply exploiting their mood at that current situation and surrounding. There are several people who "ride" great whites by holding on to their fin WHEN there's clear water and no aggressing factors like prey around. Only because you can do something with an animal, doesn't mean at all that you trained it like a pet.
As for your parrot example, it has been showed on only very few occasions that they have a brain that allows them to differ between the outlines of different human faces, therefore "recognising" certain humans and their sounds. However those cases are so few, that you simply cannot take it as a rule.
You can train gorillas, Orang-Utans, Chimps, Elephants and Dolphins/Orcas because their adaptive skills are so vastly superior to other animals and because their brain-movements when "thinking" are literally identical to humans.
Even Dogs and Cats were horribly slow learners few 1000 years ago, only through the longevity of their "training" (100s if not 1000s of years) their genetics made them as docile as whe know them today.
Point being: Training animals is not as easy and "matter-of-fact" as you make it sound at all and only because it has worked in certain instances, doesn't make it a rule at all.
But that's not my problem with the film. If the writers wrote "trained raptors", they simply wrote it and now it's in the movie. The idea itself stays absolutely stupid. Doesn't mean it can't be dumb fun, but since the first jurassic park showed us Raptors as this horrific predators, I simply fail to see how Chris Pratt managed to make them his allies in a few years. I'm sure they'll explain it with some kind of DNA-Science shit which will make it all the more ludicrous.
