@demon-witch05 hulloooo!!
Okay I really wanna talk about my Jurassic world au and how much effort I'm putting into the raptors so you get a ramble about that lmao
So my parents currently run a puppy mill, and for the last few years I lived with them I was the person who trained their G1 dogs. I went through the AKC puppy star, CGC, CGCA, CGCU, and earned a few Dock Diving ribbons with their G1 AKC/CKC female Labrodor Retriever "Lily" and helped tutor my brother with his AKC/UKC G1 female German Shepard "Gypsy", so I got big into dog training and a few different methods of training. For posteristies sake there's a few different kinds of training and also different motivation types depending on the dog in specific as well.
Lily was a very treat motivated dog, she would do anything for a treat and learned new commands and commands types easily. She was also a very stubborn dog, so we used what was called a "high value reward" which was either a treat type she really enjoyed or a large amount of her usual treats everytime she'd succeed at a hard task or for emergency recall. After she starts to succeed with the hard tasks you lower the value of the reward until eventually you can make it a string command, and then you can move on to the next subject to learn.
Gypsy was a motivated only by toys, treats did nothing for her. Toys are much harder to teach with, especially without being able to have a high value reward. But she learned string commands way easier then Lily did with treats, (which was surprising because Lily learned string commands really quick.)
(Fun fact! Another motivation type is praise, my dad had a service dog, Mocha, who was a CKC yellow labrodar retriever, who did loved toys and treats, but untilmately what he really wanted was a pat on the head and to be called a good boy. He was a delight and loved to be included in training the other two and would often stand off in the distance and watch to teach himself the trick without getting in the way.)
Without explaining why that's relavent I'm going to move on to rodents!
Before I ever trained dogs, I trained rodents of various kinds.
When I was 14-17 I ran a rodentry, breeding and selling rats, mice, guinea pigs, hedgehogs, rabbits, ASF's, sugar gliders, and hamsters.
This was mainly because I was super interested in genetics and how animal behaviors could be influenced by genetics vs how they were raised, breeding them with the ultimate goal of having pet quality animals that lived long healthy lives without needing a human to handle them every single day as they grew up.
I frequently took in rescues, abandoned pets, and animals with health issues for the purpose of rehabing and rehoming, this is something I still do a lot of. I also made myself available for answering questions such as what types of food will help their pets live longer, healthier lives, what to do in X situation, and identified genetics for other breeders.
In order to really, get my name out in the exotics community (which I was already a part of and decently known) I trained my rodents to do tricks and I would bring a few of them with me to the reptile shows I was helping my boss vend and let people give them treats as rewards.
So, in my experience, most rats/guinea pigs/rabbits were far more interested in doing tricks and learning new things for enrichment, any treats or pets were just a bonus. While mice responded better to treats. But all rodents would more often then not, refuse a treat from a stranger regardless of anything.
If you don't know, domestic rats will "test" any new kind of treat you try to give them, one rat in a group will nip off a little bite and then leave the rest there, and they'll come back in however long it takes for them to know its safe to eat. I always suspected it's to test for poison but I'm not entirely sure.
Training cats and lizards are a mixture of dogs and rodents, treats help and every animal has a different reward preference like dogs, but they often will only learn/listen for their own enrichment.
All of that rambling and needless exposition out of the way to say, I'm building a the raptors training system and reactions to it based around my own, many, interactions with animal training but I'm also going to include Falconry, which is something I haven't yet, until recently, done thorough reasearch on. As well as some loose training methods used by circuses and equestrians to account for the fact they will be large and very dangerous, and the handlers will have to be separated from them phsyically at all times as they get older.
Falconry as a whole tends to focus on replicating wild behaviors and focusing on what is most natural for the birds themselves, either in hopes of releasing it back into the wild or giving a keeper a better quality of life.
Circuses are generally bad for animals and the trainers don't know what their doing half the time but you could, theoretically, do it well and good for the animal while also putting on a show for the frowd, and in Jurassic World we see that's what they do with their I-Raptors, putting on a show while keeping the handlers separate and safe.
Which is where equestrian training comes in, specifically liberty training, which is another thing I'm going to attempt to incorporate into the training scenes!
I want the raptors to come off as large, dangerous creatures with their own thoughts and agendas and preferences without painting them as big feathery dogs.
Okay, I think training rambles is over, I wanna talk about why Falconry, as everything else is fairly obvious.
The raptors I've chosen are the largest of the dromeosaurs, which are feathered therapods that include velociraptors, Utah Raptors.
From what we can tell, birds are the closest living relatives to therapod (and other) dinosaurs, so when figuring out they look and behave I need to use what examples I have access to. Which is how I wound up where I am.
When picking what birds to use, I decided a few things. They needed to be bigger birds, findable in Utah, and I wanted to use a different bird for each of the five raptors, because all of the dinosaurs from Jurassic world are based around frogs, fish, snakes, etc, this would be the first dinosaurs to use bird DNA to fill in the gaps. So they would want to have a wider range of variation.
The birds I landed on were, Golden Eagle, Great Horned Owl, Northern Goshawk, Red-Tailed Hawk, and Osprey. Each for their own reasons!
The Golden Eagle is the largest of the five, and also the fastest.
The Great Horned Owl is nocturnal, and built for hunting at night.
The Northern Goshawk is the smallest, and the most aggressive.
The Red-Tailed Hawk is one of the more common species, and are usually easy for falconers to work with.
The Osprey is a fishing bird, and is the only extant bird in it's genus and the only genus in it's family.
Behaviors! Body language!
I'm going to borrow behaviors and body language from a lot of animals, including and not limited to; birds, dogs, cats, big cats, hyenas, wolves, bearded dragons,
I was going to ramble about animal body language but I have a headache and this is really long lol but if you actually read all this and are also still interested feel free to ask some other time.
