Not true. It may have been safer to only bring back herbivores to start as they do not eat meat- but not particularly smart. Especially with how they went about things.
We know very little about dinosaurs. We can’t really study them alive. There are living creatures today who only after centuries or more of documented study are we discovering things- like that many herbivores are omnivores, or things about their behavior etc. herbivores, especially large herbivores, can cause ecological disasters and ecosystem collapse. Herbivores can be aggressive, territorial, and just because they may not eat what they kill doesn’t mean herbivores do not kill. Elephants kill almost as many humans as crocodiles on an “average” for example, and the “deadliest” animals are often secondary killers- disease vectors or on ingestion. Fresh water snails dwarf the third place people killing animal by a huge margin for example
Had they brought back small herbivores and studied them for years or decades, and slowly added more types of dinosaur over years and decades to allow them to understand the behaviors and capabilities of the creatures, potential dangers and challenges, they could have prepared much better and been in a better position to manage the risks. Of course the parks systems were laughably poorly designed, overly centralized and without proper safe guards and fail safes, without proper redundancies and hard locks or overides. Management was terrible and staffing was atrocious. Think of the ethical malfeasance- they cloned a huge variety of animals in great numbers that they didn’t even have the proper knowledge to provide veterans care for, enrichment and fulfillment.
The premise of Jurassic park would be like if instead of sending up a satellite or a dog into orbit we created the first exo atmospheric rocket and decided to try and send an entire 3rd grade school class to Mars with it. The non subtle message of the whole work is hubris- not necessarily anti science or advancement- but Hammond over reached his grasp. His “playing god” wasn’t because he “made life,” he was “playing god” because he thought he was infallible. “Nothing can possibly go wrong…” He wanted his park so he rushed and cut corners and took on a MONUMENTAL and complex task that should take a lifetime or more to get to where they were at the start of the first film- and he did it in a few years more or less.
The timeline puts the cloning of dinosaurs and site B at less than 10 years before the events of the first Jurassic park.
Hammond started construction of the park in the late 80’s (88?) and Grant and Ellie are invited to tour in 93. That’s 5 years from starting construction to completion. 1986 was Injens first cloning of a dinosaur. 7 years before. It was an “ambitious” project would be an understatement.
Beyond that the “dinosaurs” were not truly such, instead using other DNA to “fill in gaps” and through the in universe works we see numerous often extreme ways that this results in unpredictability and unforeseen results.
Simply put the failing was not to only clone herbivores as the overall scale of the project, the pace of the project and its growth, and the complexity and unknowns of the project would demand any prudent and responsible person would have taken much greater care and realistically things should have been on a much smaller scale Over a much longer timeline.
There is also the fact that near as we can tell almost no other precautions were taken or serious thought given to how dangerous some of these animals were. So I mean…
Hubris. Even if you think that herbivores would have solved the problem- cloning carnivores was hubris by Hammond and team.
We know very little about dinosaurs. We can’t really study them alive. There are living creatures today who only after centuries or more of documented study are we discovering things- like that many herbivores are omnivores, or things about their behavior etc. herbivores, especially large herbivores, can cause ecological disasters and ecosystem collapse. Herbivores can be aggressive, territorial, and just because they may not eat what they kill doesn’t mean herbivores do not kill. Elephants kill almost as many humans as crocodiles on an “average” for example, and the “deadliest” animals are often secondary killers- disease vectors or on ingestion. Fresh water snails dwarf the third place people killing animal by a huge margin for example
Hammond started construction of the park in the late 80’s (88?) and Grant and Ellie are invited to tour in 93. That’s 5 years from starting construction to completion. 1986 was Injens first cloning of a dinosaur. 7 years before. It was an “ambitious” project would be an understatement.
Beyond that the “dinosaurs” were not truly such, instead using other DNA to “fill in gaps” and through the in universe works we see numerous often extreme ways that this results in unpredictability and unforeseen results.
There is also the fact that near as we can tell almost no other precautions were taken or serious thought given to how dangerous some of these animals were. So I mean…
Hubris. Even if you think that herbivores would have solved the problem- cloning carnivores was hubris by Hammond and team.