A game warden (also called a trooper, conservation officer, or wildlife officer) is an employee of a wildlife preserve having much the same role as a gamekeeper in the United Kingdom, and who plays a major role in keeping the ecological balance in a region, such as a nature reserve. In the United States, they are state or local officials who enforce laws pertaining to the hunting, fishing, and trapping of wild animals; in some areas they have general law enforcement authority, meaning that they can make arrests for general violations of the law. In the United Kingdom, gamekeepers manage areas of the countryside in order to make sure that there is enough game in an area for the benefit of sport hunting. This therefore extends to the prevention of poaching, the release and management of game birds such as pheasants, and the control of pests and predators such as foxes. A gamekeeper is usually the employee of a landowner, and thus the areas they manage are on the landowner’s private estate and not part of the wilderness owned and managed by a government entity as in the United States.
John Hammond employed an official Game Warden, Robert Muldoon, as one of the most important staff members at Jurassic Park on Isla Nublar. Muldoon’s duties largely extended to the control of animals, such as tranquilizing them for containment and transportation, and managing maintenance situations in which animals may come into play. This makes the role of Jurassic Park’s Game Warden more like that of an American game warden, though the employer-employee relationship is more similar to a British gamekeeper. The Game Warden was also something of a head of security, and Muldoon himself was personally responsible for convincing Hammond to keep a number of lethal weapons in the park for emergencies, which he made liberal use of to disable the Tyrannosaurus and at least one Velociraptor.
