Most people never see exotic wild animals in person. I live pretty far in the country, and my animal sighting list goes pretty much dog, cat, raccoon, squirrel, mouse, skunk, turkey, various birds, and fish... nothing that the Discovery Channel is going to send a film crew out to document. I've seen sharks and whales, but I live at a beach and those are not unusual things there.
What would be unusual is for me to stroll around suburban Massachusetts and run into a Rhino. Rhinos, who are much feared in Africa, are bad things to run into. They are very aggressive and territorial, and would most likely kill me rather than tolerate me moving through his realm. It would care very little if I told it, "No no, you have the wrong country, doctors in America don't think that your powdered horn cures impotence." I don't even think it would eat me, just kill me, mostly to let me know how things get done in Rhino Town.
I'd rather not be smashed into pudding by a livid horned monster who weighs 3400 pounds. My car, which would end your life if I drove it over you, weighs 2300 pounds.
So, a rhino isn't what I want to see walking around suburban Massachusetts. To spare you from other tales of animal violence, I am also not disappointed by the lack of lions, cobras, leopards, cheetahs, hippopotami (?), komodo dragons, alligators, polar bears, wolverines, anacondas, chupacabra, and Godzillas living in the moors behind my house. Giraffes don't have a reputation for violence, but I'd still rather not have one walking around by my rhododendrons. Africa, Japan, Indonesia... you can keep that stuff, guys.
That doesn't mean that, in a controlled environment, I wouldn't enjoy looking at a rhino. It's an amazing, even beautiful creature. I'd pay good money to go somewhere safe and stare at rhinos and lions and other things I don't see in American suburbia. That's why people make zoos.
SL, which reflects real life even when the tigers walk on two legs and talk, is naturally going to have a Zoo go up somewhere at some point. I found one while playing in water parks. You'll get a water park article later when the photographer and I return and I am wearing a more flattering swimsuit. But we did find a zoo.
Paradise Of Fun is a sprawling entertainment complex. It features a water park, a zoo, a mall, and a food court. I went through all of them, but... c'mon guy, there's a Zoo!
It's not a long walk, but it's full of cool animals! Sorry about the exclamation point, but everyone is a kid when they go to the zoo. Unless the adult likes to go on safari a lot, an adult and a toddler have about the same amount of in-person elephant watching time. They're both children, in that sense. I shall therefore conduct myself as one, which my boss here at the SL Enquirer will tell you isn't actually all that unusual. There are very few fully self-actualized adults in the field of sportswriting, and when you throw in the virtual world part... you're lucky that I can even write at all.
POF Zoo is a large circular area where you can move from exhibit to exhibit. You first run into some flamingos, and they are across from the elephants. They have three elephants in a cage that looks about the size of the one that they have UFC fights in, but it is tough to be cruel to virtual animals. You can't jump into the cage with them, even if you are a well-trained cheerleader with pretty impressive hang time for a white chick.
Never fear, because the next exhibit is the Lion and Tiger one. This one has a very short fence, but if you hop over it for a selfie, you sort of hover above the animals. Do note from my picture in the article of this exhibit that at least one mother had no problem at all bringing an infant to a lion den with only a 3-foot fence (which a journalist was able to hop over) between her and both the Ghost and the Darkness. She lived, by the way... I saw her at the Food Court later.
If you survive the Tiger exhibit, your next stop involves tropical birds. Unfortunately, the one that looked like Toucan Sam had no breakfast cereal to offer, so f*ck him and his exhibit.
Across the lane, we have giraffes. Three giraffes also occupy a Hell In The Cell-sized pen similar to the one housing the elephants. You'll notice that the giraffes were the only creatures who we didn't have to zoom the camera into their cage to get a good picture of them, one of the few benefits of being taller than your cage.
There's a river after the giraffe exhibit. As a true investigative journalist, I dove into the river to see if it had sharks or whales or Nemos in it and was an exhibit in itself. No such luck.
My next stop was Zebras and the previously mentioned Rhino. They were in cages, there's no way to jump in, I tried. I have a Slap animation I was going to try out on the rhino, but the zoo designers were one step ahead of me. I'd recommend not putting a striped animal like a zebra behind bars, which in a two dimensional game appear as big stripes. I could barely see the fellow.
They had a gross exhibit with spiders and snakes, but I only hung around long enough for one picture. I don't like spiders and snakes, even virtual ones.
Monkeys were next, I got a pretty good shot of one through the bars. He was funky like a monkey. You really can look at him in his cage and understand why the monkeys hate humans so much in those Planet Of The Apes movies. There were antelopes after that, they were boring, and that was all she wrote for the Zoo.
We'll be back for the rest of the park later, but for now... life's a Zoo.
Paradise of Fun Zoo = http://maps.secondlife.com/
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