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.