Tall tales: mucking in at London Zoo

How close would you fancy getting to a tiger? Last week at London Zoo I was close enough to hand-feed raw horse flesh to not one but two huge and hungry Sumatran tigers.

It was as terrifying as it sounds, and seemed even less appealing after the obligatory health and safety lecture, during which their enthusiastic and hunky keeper - I imagine tiger keepers are the rock stars of the zoo world - ran me through just how Lumpa and Raika would tear me limb from limb. 'Tigers are assassins,' he said, 'but these are fourth-generation captive animals so they have no idea how to kill. It would be messy, and take a while. But don't doubt that whatever goes in there is not coming back out.'

It was with more than a little trepidation that I approached the salivating beasts, but not for nothing was I raised on Michaela Strachan and The Really Wild Show. As clichéd at it sounds, feeling the breath of a tiger on my hand was one of the most exhilarating things I've ever experienced. You can keep your free-running and sky-diving; I get my adrenaline kicks from big cats, and I must have been doing something right, because once feeding time was over, Lumpa proceeded to get his kicks in a slightly more carnal fashion with a submissive and rather bored-looking Raika.

I was spending the day boiler-suited up at the zoo as part of its 'Keeper for a Day' programme, where you, too, can feed carrots to the giraffes, nuts to the monkeys and jumping crickets to the meerkats - although I recommend you learn from my example and don't alienate the rest of the group by muttering 'Simples!' to yourself as you do it. The animals are selected for their cute factor, so there's nothing to stop the arachnophobe from finding their inner David Attenborough.

But it's not all fun and games. There's a fair bit of fruit-chopping and poo-shovelling thrown in for the sake of authenticity. But I doubt there will be many other days in my life that begin with a 'preening' from a baby penguin, a slightly more violent form of grooming than I'm used to, and end with a pack of doe-eyed ring-tailed lemurs holding my hand and crawling over me in their search for juicy chunks of apple. I don't mind being covered in zebra excrement. In fact, I think a career change might be in order.

Be a Keeper for a Day at ZSL London Zoo, £280 (zsl.org)