travel – Pain In The Bud

This Is The Zoo Of My Dreams!

Have you ever wanted to own or design your own zoo?

Visitors to Buddy’s Tropical Paradise are greeted by friendly staff who man the entrance, a broad vertical garden shaped like an arch that straddles the main path leading inside.

When they walk through the gate a new vista opens up before them: tiered tropical gardens, waterfalls, and wide boulevards lined with palm trees and flowers. They hear the rumble of big cats calling to each other in the distance and monkeys shrieking as they fling themselves from branch to branch.

A monorail carries passengers above, its tracks looping over animal enclosures and threading tunnels that emerge amid the terraced jungle, eateries and souvenir shops.

And straight ahead, the first exhibit: a sprawling habitat occupied by jaguars who are enjoying some yums and will probably have a nap in a few minutes.

Buddy’s Tropical Paradise doesn’t exist in the real world, of course. It’s my first attempt at fully functional, guest-attracting park in Planet Zoo, a simulator that allows you to do practically anything you can think of.

You can design your own habitats, enclosures, buildings and scenery. Fancy a monorail that laps the entire zoo? You can do that. Picturing a 1940s style Tarzan-themed jungle boat ride where visitors can see caiman, capuchin monkeys and jaguars up close? Start carving up the river, my friend!

Bengal Tiger — A Bengal tiger stalking the tall grass in Planet Zoo.

Jaguars — Lunch time in the jaguar habitat, followed by the all-important nap time.

As the zoo’s architect, you’re responsible for everything. You’ll need veterinary facilities, animal quarantine, keeper huts. You’ll need to staff your park with veterinarians, keepers, security officers, maintenance staff and mechanics.

And don’t forget the vendors to run the souvenir shops and man the food stalls, where your guests can grab hot dogs or cool off with slushies on a hot day.

A suitable home for your animals

Designing a habitat is about a lot more than reserving space for your animals. You’re tasked with picking the right barriers, mindful of which species can climb or leap great heights. A good habitat should reflect the animal’s home in the wild with appropriate flora, temperatures the species thrives in and a feeding system that mimics the way they’d naturally obtain food.

Elephant shower — Elephants cool off in their enclosure in Planet Zoo. Every habitat must be designed with the right atmosphere, flora, terrain, shelter and enrichment appropriate for the species it houses.

Orangutan habitat — A wide view of my orangutan habitat. Two orangutans are at the base of the stone steps in the distance.

Then there’s enrichment. Trees for your monkeys to climb, ponds for your tigers to take a dip, bushes for your elephants to strip. Different species enjoy different toys and challenges. An ice block with meat in the middle would hit the spot for carnivores on a hot summer day, but your pandas will want bamboo.

Designing habitats and getting them just right is not only fun, it’s an intuitive way to learn about the needs of individual species and how they live.

The leopard learning incident

My first stab at building a leopard enclosure was a disaster. It looked pretty enough with its Hindu-inspired temple architecture and pond. There were plenty of scratching posts and trees that could withstand claws.

I installed a sprinkler to help the big cats cool off, designed a series of raised platforms for them to climb, and scattered enrichment items all over the habitat. The leopards had balls to bat around, boxes to sit in, rubbing pads, logs and rocks to climb, and plenty of cover and shade.

But when I had the leopards brought into the zoo, through quarantine and into their exhibit, I realized you can’t just design a home for animals from an aesthetic perspective. I’d used several plant and tree species that weren’t native to leopard habitats, the terrain was wrong and I hadn’t paid any mind to ambient temperature.

Making those mistakes was truly educational. When your animals aren’t happy in Planet Zoo, protesters show up, and it’s up to you to read the alerts about where you went wrong and how to remedy your mistakes. It’s an intuitive and fun way to learn about each species and the environments they thrive in.

The escaped jaguar

I’m still learning the ropes, although I do have a basic knowledge of the way the game is designed thanks to some time playing Frontier’s theme park building game, Planet Coaster. The first time I tried to build a jaguar enclosure, I forgot to wall off a viewing cave with protective glass, which my guests did not appreciate.

Even though jaguars don’t like to confront humans, a big cat is a big cat, and the game sent me urgent warnings as people ran for the exits. When I found the escaped jag, he was lounging not far from his enclosure, watching people freak out.

Elephant and ball — Enrichment is a key aspect of habitat design. Toys, puzzles, obstacles, climbing platforms for arboreal species, ponds for animals who like to get wet — they’re all necessary to keep animals healthy and happy.

In real life it’d be a disaster, but I was able to revert to a previous save, make sure the viewing cave was sufficiently protected, and this time around I placed only two jaguars — a male and a female — in the large enclosure.

After a while, while I was tinkering with an exhibit meant for capuchin monkeys, the game sent me an alert: the female jaguar was pregnant! She gave birth to two energetic, curious cubs who are currently having fun chasing each other around the enclosure and going for dips in their pond.

Night view — Part of the main boulevard in Buddy’s Tropical Paradise, viewed at night. Players are responsible for everything you see here — lighting, shops, flowers and plants, benches, waste baskets and more.

Asian section — Shops and a monorail station in an unfinished Asia-themed area of the zoo.

As in real life, the game has you source animals from an international pool, with information on breeding and genetics so you can contribute to conservation. When you adopt animals, their first stop is the veterinary facilities for examination, then quarantine. When they pass quarantine, you can have your staff release them into their enclosures.

It took me several hours to familiarize myself with the basics, design an entrance and a main boulevard for the guests, create some tiered gardens with eateries and shops, and get my jaguar and orangutan exhibits up and running.

My monorail currently runs out of track a quarter of the way through the park, and my river boat ride looks pretty cool, with dense jungle, towering trees and the ruins of Mayan temples not far from shore, but completing it will require appropriate barriers to keep the animals in as well as building out more scenery.

Jaguar habitat — A jaguar in her habitat.

I’ve got my sights set on an elephant exhibit next. It will be necessarily huge, so it’s good to reserve the land early and plan smaller exhibits and facilities around it. I’d also like to put the elephants, lions, zebra, giraffes etc into one Africa-themed section of the park, while the tigers, giant pandas and snow monkeys will be housed in an Asia-themed section, with buildings that reflect the architectural styles of countries like Japan and China.

There are also aquatic exhibits, animals for your own reptile house and aviaries. Those enclosures are more complex than the relatively straightforward orangutan exhibit, for example, so I’ll have to spend some time figuring out what makes a good home for peacocks, sharks and komodo dragons.

So far I’ve resisted the temptation to make one giant felid park, with snow leopards, pumas and cheetahs joining the tigers, lions, jaguars and others. Of course I did name it Buddy’s Tropical Paradise, so I may be forced down the all-cat road if Bud gets his say.

Planet Zoo is not a traditional video game. There are no winners or losers, and there’s no “end state” unless you intentionally include one.

It’s more relaxing and much slower-paced than your typical game, and it’s a great feeling when you’ve managed to take something from your imagination and perfect the design. When you want to check your progress or just admire your own work, you can set the camera to follow guests and watch as people stroll through your zoo, taking in the sights and sounds.

In that sense it’s more like a virtual model train set or living diorama. You can load up the game and tinker with your zoo when you’ve got a spare 15 minutes, or spend a few hours getting absorbed in the finer details of how to keep pangolin and red pandas happy.

Planet Zoo is appropriate for all ages, although its depth and complexity would probably be a lot for younger kids. In that case, it’s probably best to have an adult guide them so they understand the game is built on interlocking systems: exhibits need power and water, shops need staff, veterinary surgeries need veterinarians and so on.

It’ll have enormous appeal to kids who enjoy Lego, Minecraft and other building games, so if you’ve got a little builder in your life, this could be a good fit. But make no mistake, there’s a lot here for adults to enjoy too.

PITB verdict: Four out of five paws!

The only thing keeping Planet Zoo back from a five-paw rating is the DLC (downloadable content) scheme, which requires users to pay extra for certain “packs” containing extra animals, scenery pieces and scenarios. That’s a problem plaguing the larger video game industry, but if you wait for a sale, the normally $44.95 game can be had for as low as $11.24 on Steam. DLC is likewise discounted. Steam’s summer sale is a great opportunity to get games like this for a fraction of their normal price. This year’s summer sale is scheduled for June 27, though it’s possible Planet Zoo could be put on sale before then as well.

Study: Humans Aren’t Great At Judging Feline Moods, But We Can Improve

People who were asked to identify feline moods based only on audio of meows fared the worst in the study.

A new study suggests people misinterpret their cats’ moods often, but offers an easy fix.

A group of researchers from Paris Nanterre University split participants into three groups: one that was shown soundless video and images of cats, a second group that heard audio-only recordings of feline vocalizations, and a third group that had the benefit of video and sound.

Participants from the first two groups misinterpreted feline moods as much as 28 percent of the time, the study found, but people who had the benefit of seeing and hearing cats correctly identified their mental state almost 92 percent of the time.

The study also yielded another insight: people are much better at accurately assessing positive moods than they are at spotting an upset or antagonistic cat.

cute cat with blue eyes — Credit: Sami Aksu/Pexels

The findings indicate we’re better off giving our cats our full attention than, say, jumping to conclusions about what they want based solely on their vocalizations or the position of their tails. It seems obvious, but how many of us have our eyes on a screen or we’re multitasking when our cats want our attention?

Of 630 people who participated in the research, 166 were professionals in animal-related fields like veterinary medicine and animal behaviorism, while the rest were lay people. There was a major gender imbalance among participants, with 574 women, 51 men and five people who didn’t identify with either gender.

It’s not clear how such an imbalance might skew the results, and it would be nice to see follow-up research evenly split between women and men.

Buddy The Cat And The Search For The Lap Of Luxury

Sir Buddy leads an expedition into the jungle to find the legendary Lap of Luxury.

AMAZON RAINFOREST — At the peak of the hill, still well within the darkness of the tree canopy where only a few slabs of light penetrate through the understory to the jungle floor, a path stops abruptly.

In its place is a steep drop and the mouth of an underground chasm carrying water over the edge, creating one of the planet’s most spectacular waterfalls — and a sweeping vista of the lake and its shores below, where structures from deep antiquity seem to exist only as outlines in the mist.

It is here in the Lost City of Casarabe that intrepid explorer Buddy the Cat believes he’ll find the legend his species has sought for more than a thousand years.

It is, he believes, the site of the Lap of Luxury.

“Many explorers have braved these jungles in search of the legendary Lap of Luxury,” Sir Buddy says as members of his team pad around their camp. “I stand on the shoulders of some pretty big cats here, on the cusp of history, to finally achieve what so many felines set out to do.”

buddy_archaeologist2 — Buddy on the hunt for the legendary Lap of Luxury, which may be located in the Lost City of Casarabe.

Buddy believes the Lap of Luxury will be found in this ancient city, which was abandoned more than a thousand years ago for reasons that so far elude the experts accompanying him. Only a very small part of the Lost City of Casarabe is visible even this deep in the jungle. The flora here is too dense and the jungle floor too dark to give up its secrets so easily.

Under Sir Buddy’s direction, teams have cleared a thick network of vines to reveal a stepped pyramid, the twelve spires of a temple dedicated to a mysterious jaguar deity, and a remarkably well-preserved palace that Buddy believes once belonged to an aristocratic feline.

Some seventy rooms are contained in the palace, including a chamber the team has dubbed the Hall of a Thousand Naps, where stunning stone-carved reliefs depict an advanced felid civilization that engaged in napping not only as a biological necessity, but a function of religious fervor.

“The Caztecs were known for their brutality and the Layans were known for their enduring empire, but the hallmark of Casarabian society was the elevation of napping into high art,” says Ferdinand Lyle, an expert on South American antiquities with the British Museum. “Indeed, grand murals depict a civilization that measured time in naps and meals, and even military disputes with neighboring powers were scheduled around shut-eye. To the Casarabians, violating the sanctity of the Nap Schedule was considered an affront to the very fabric of society.”

jaguar lying on tree log — Otorongo, one of Buddy’s buddies, met the intrepid explorers deep in the jungle and accompanied them to the Lost City, facilitating a cultural exchange of napping technique. Credit: Benni Fish/Pexels

Legends and the surviving records of neighboring civilizations mention the Lap of Luxury using a dictionary’s worth of superlatives to describe its magnificence. Aztec scholars called it “simultaneously radiant and outrageously comfortable, always the perfect temperature, the substrate upon which kings enjoyed serene naps and gentle massages while being fed candied figs.”

It is alternately described as gilded, soft, gem-like in its facets and silken in tactile sensation.

“Of its comforts, it knows no equals,” wrote 19th century explorer Percy Fawcett, who spent the latter part of his life searching for Casarabe. “If today’s artisans were capable of emulating such perfection, which they are obviously not, all of civilization would grind to a halt as millions fall into deep, satisfying slumber.”

Khalbalique, a jaguar historian and contemporary of the Casarabians, wrote that the Lap of Luxury “thrillified me down to my paws.”

“Such was the lazification of this tremendulomentous relaxatory,” the big cat wrote, “that I found it extraordinatiously operose to extractify my personage from its embraculations.”

buddy_archaeologist — Sir Buddy strides fearlessly through the jungle, determined to find the Lost City and its most precious treasure, the Lap of Luxury. Here he poses for a portraitist who will send his likeness back to the Explorer’s Club to be hung on its walls alongside Mewis and Clarke, Claward Carter, Catto the Navigator and other intrepid legends.

Regardless of the conflicting accounts, all agree on one thing: the Lap of Luxury is magnificent.

Sir Buddy and his team are working out the details of bringing a helicopter into the deep jungle in order to use LIDAR, or light detection and ranging, to sweep the area. Using a mix of near-infrared, ultraviolet and visible light, a team using LIDAR from the air can digitally “remove” the dense jungle to reveal the structures underneath, natural and man-made.

For the intrepid explorers it’s an advantage their forebears never had, and it’s one reason why Sir Buddy believes he will succeed where those who came before him did not.

“With this technology we can map the entire city and find its most opulent palaces and temples, the places most likely to house the elusive Lap of Luxury,” Sir Buddy says. “When we find it, it shall be my honor to be the first cat in more than two hundred years to settle into it, get comfortable and have a nice nap.”

lidar — LIDAR reveals the jungle’s secrets by peering through the trees and the thick blanket of foliage that has swallowed once-glorious cities.

Cats Are The Monks At This Japanese Temple

Nyan Nyan Ji translates to “meow meow shrine.”

One of the highlights of my trip to Japan last summer was Gotokuji Temple, the famous “cat shrine” in Tokyo’s Setagaya suburb.

Gotokuji is home to thousands of statues of maneki-neko, or “beckoning cat,” an important and ubiquitous image in Japan: Statues of maneki-neko adorn shops and virtually every public place in Tokyo, but Gotokuji is where the legend of the beckoning cat was born. Visitors write prayers on the statues and ask for good luck for a variety of venture, from opening new businesses to getting married.

There is, however, only one current feline resident at Gotokuji, while Kyoto’s Nyan Nyan Ji — literally “meow meow shrine” — is populated exclusively by feline “monks,” who wear monkly garb and take their duties — especially napping, er, meditating — very seriously.

The most recognizable of them is Koyuki, the chief cat priestess at Nyan Nyan Ji.

Here are some photos, all courtesy of the temple’s Instagram, showing what life is like for Koyuki and her fellow priests:

Screenshot_2020-08-12 ねこ地蔵とおる ( nekojizo) is on Instagram(2) — “This is how it’s supposed to be, humans: You kneeling before us. Those ancient Egyptians had it right.”

Screenshot_2020-08-12 ねこ地蔵とおる ( nekojizo) is on Instagram(5) — “I can call upon powerful minions to smite you whenever I please.”

Screenshot_2020-08-12 ねこ地蔵とおる ( nekojizo) is on Instagram(9) — “Tiny humans are permitted to touch my holy personage.”

Screenshot_2020-08-12 ねこ地蔵とおる ( nekojizo) is on Instagram(4) — “And here is the nursery, where it’s currently reading time for our kittens…”

Screenshot_2020-08-12 ねこ地蔵とおる ( nekojizo) is on Instagram(3) — “Walk with me on the path to deliciousness…”

Screenshot_2020-08-12 ねこ地蔵とおる ( nekojizo) is on Instagram(8) — “Read the sign! We’re not open until I says so. Now if you please, I have napping to do.”

Hotels With Cats: Getting Your Cat Fix On Vacation

Cat-friendly hotels for cat-loving travelers.

As any ~~cat owner~~ servant knows, traveling is tough.

Not only do you have to make accommodations for your feline overlord(s) — including finding a reliable cat-sitter and writing a 32-page guide to properly caring for your kitties — there’s the issue of separation anxiety on both sides.

How can I sleep without Buddy using me as a mattress and walking on my face when he wants me to get up? Quite well, actually, but that’s beside the point.

A new site, Hotels With Cats, profiles resorts, hotels, AirBnBs and other accommodations throughout the world that feature cats on-premises. It’s basically a directory of cat-lovers who run hotels, for cat-lovers who love to travel.

Ashleigh Mills, the site’s founder, says she came up with the idea on a 2017 trip to Bali. While she was spending six glorious weeks in one of the Earth’s most beautiful places, she also missed her two cats terribly.

That’s when Tiger stepped in. The friendly tabby cat belongs to the people who run Geria Giri Shanti bungalows, and he served as Ashleigh’s feline companion for the duration of her stay.

“His presence soothed me when I missed my own cats,” Ashleigh wrote. As a bonus, “I knew I was giving my business to fellow animal lovers which was a good feeling as well.”

Tiger the Tabby Cat — Tiger: A cat on a permanent vacation with a rotating cast of humans to cater to his needs. *Credit: Hotels With Cats*

Thus far Hotels With Cats has profiled kitty-occupied hotels, lodges and seaside bungalows in Greece, France, Italy, Spain, Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia and the US of A.

Buddy Is Angry! — “You’re telling me you’re going to relax in the sun on some pristine beach while I sit here at home waiting for the cat-sitter to come by and shovel slop into my bowl? No way, dude. I’m coming with you.”

Your own cats might not be too keen on the deal. After all, they’re left at home without their favorite humans. But sometimes it’s okay to lie to your cats, and in this case a little fib — “Oh, there were no cats where we stayed!” — could prevent furry little egos from getting bruised.