Wel­ling­ton Zoo is now offer­ing MEERKAT ENCOUNTERS. The cap­it­al let­ters are there to try to con­vey my excite­ment when I heard the news. I don’t think even cap­it­al let­ters can con­vey how excited I was when the zoo invited us along to meet the meerkats for ourselves. I’m mak­ing it my aim to touch all the anim­als after all.

Meerkat encoun­ters usu­ally cost $90 and hap­pen at 4pm, which is actu­ally a really great time at the zoo because anim­als are just start­ing to wake up and become more act­ive. What is spe­cial about the meerkat encoun­ters is that any­one over the age of four can do the encounter, because there’s not a lot of danger in the meerkat mis­tak­ing small chil­dren for food, unlike with the chee­tahs.

The keep­ers will let you into the enclos­ure and guide you over to some logs where you sit your ass on a cush­ion and wait for the curi­ous meerkats to come over. Pro tip: try to sit on the lower down logs, because that way you are more likely to have a meerkat climb on you. They’re fed cat bis­cuits and scamper around while you waggle rose­mary branches at them because meerkats love scents. The keep­ers will also answer any ques­tions for you (for example, the way you can tell male & female meerkats apart is pretty much the same as humans – look at their gen­it­als. Per­vert). One meerkat will always keep lookout for the oth­ers, and when a plane flies over­head, you can giggle as they all run for cov­er at his warn­ing.

If you’re super lucky, there may even be meerkat babies for you to awwwww at. We were that lucky, as you will see in the cool pho­tos taken by Kim from Whisky&wry. The meerkat mummy Feta even wanted to come over and say hi to us, but she got way­laid by babies feed­ing off her instead. Encoun­ters last half an hour, and are pretty unfor­get­table. If you can afford it (10% of the money goes to con­ser­va­tion pro­grammes in the wild, by the way), you should def­in­itely give an anim­al encounter a go.