Getting up close and personal with the inmates of Auckland Zoo

The ring-tailed lemurs are charming creatures with their big eyes, which seem even bigger face-to-face. Picture / Jim Eagles

Lemurs are wonderfully refined little creatures. Turn up with some of their favourite sultanas and they pick them out of your hands one at a time with great delicacy.

Not so, I'd have to say, the cotton top tamarinds. Offer a cupful of fat, wriggling mealy worms and they're just as likely to knock it out of your hand in their greed.

But the tamarinds are cute. Auckland Zoo guide Dave Tuki reckons that with their little white mop-tops they look just like gremlins and he's absolutely right. Luckily, despite their bad eating habits, they don't behave like gremlins, more like naughty children.

By contrast the lemurs are reminiscent of little old ladies and gentlemen; very nimble ladies and gents to be sure, but with charming manners and gentle ways.

I met the lemurs and tamarinds face-to-face on the zoo's new primate experience, one of a series of Zoom Tours, which allow visitors inside the enclosures to meet the animals and maybe even feed them.

Other Zoom Tours take in sealions, hippos, rhinos, elephants, tigers, the African animals in the Pridelands display and the zoo's native animals.

They all sound like great fun. On the hippo tour, for instance, you can lean over a barrow and feed Snorkel - the hippo who thinks she's a human - on cabbages. Most of the time she comes close enough for visitors to feel her bristly skin.

On the tiger tour you go into the tiger's cage - while the tiger is away - to lay trails of blood leading to hidden bits of meat.

Then you watch from outside as the tiger follows your trail and devours your gift.

But I really enjoyed the primate tour, partly because you can interact more closely with tiny critters like lemurs and tamarinds than would be possible with lions or sealions - but also because it is fun to imagine the zoo's monkeys, apes and gibbons as people you know.

For instance, Horst, one of the big male orangutans with those magnificent dewlaps round his face, reminded me very much of ... no, perhaps I'd better not go there.

We also had close encounters with siaming apes, bonnet macaques and spider monkeys - one of whom tried to nick my Zoom Tour badge - but the highlight was meeting the ring-tailed lemurs.

They are charming little creatures with their big eyes, which seem even bigger when you're face-to-face; pert faces with those big black eye-patches, delicate little hands and beautiful bushy tails.

The zoo has 12 adults and two babies - "accidents" according to Tuki - and they all crowded around enthusiastically when we entered their bushy patch.

No doubt that was largely due to the fact that we were holding handfuls of sultanas but they also seemed genuinely curious.

Even the babies stared shyly at us from a nearby tree and eventually plucked up enough courage to cling to their mother and peek around her when she came down for a close inspection of the visitors.

Zoo director Glen Holland says one of the big benefits of the behind-the-scenes tours is that they make life more interesting for the animals by introducing them to new people as well as giving visitors "marvellous intimate experiences with wildlife".

But he acknowledges the idea of allowing interaction between visitors and animals is a sensitive issue on which attitudes are still evolving.

"We went through the chimpanzee tea party phase. Then there was a reaction against that and zoos became hands-off - and New Zealand was very hands-off - with visitors and animals strictly separate.

"Now we are looking at ways of bringing visitors and wildlife together through experiences like the Zoom Tours we have introduced in the past few months.

"But we do recognise that there is a fine line between a valid intimate experience and a circus atmosphere and we do look at each proposal very carefully."

As well as choosing the critters for these experiences carefully, the zoo makes sure it is the animals who decide whether to interact - "and sometimes they do choose to stay away" - as well as protecting them from human diseases (we wore gloves and anyone with a sniffle would have worn a mask) and excessive attention. So far, Holland says, the programme has gone very well though the zoo has deliberately done little to promote the tours so they would grow slowly.

"From the feedback we've received, people obviously enjoy the experience and it also enriches the animals' environment."

The zoo is looking to expand the programme by adding interaction with two male cheetahs who are due to arrive from South Africa in March or April next year. Holland, who played with cheetahs as a child, says they are terrific to interact with.

"They enjoy being with people - which is why you see ancient drawings of them with the pharaohs - and they're perfectly safe.

"Being with them is just amazing. They delight in licking salt off human skins and their tongues are like the roughest sandpaper.

"And their purring is incredibly loud. I'm sure people will just adore the chance to experience them."

* Auckland Zoo is at Western Springs and is well signposted from the Western Motorway. Phone (09) 360 3800 or visit www.aucklandzoo.co.nz (link below).