At Colchester Zoo, you can get access to an unprecedented range of animals. They have an unusual setup, in that you can choose to shadow a keeper for close access to the animals, or take part in the 'perfect partners' or wild encounters packages. They are also one of the only zoos to offer a choice of animals on their zookeeper for a day experiences.

Two options with lots of animals:

Two options with an animal of your choice:

Chester Zoo is enormous, and so it's only right that they should have some of the UK's best animal experience days.

At Chester Zoo they have a really professional setup, as you'd expect from Britain's biggest zoo. They're experts at managing visitors and at running animal experiences efficiently. The park maybe lacks the friendly, family run ethos of other zoos, but when you get one on one with the keepers they've still got the same universal love of animals they you'll see elsewhere.

Where do we start? If you've been to Chester zoo you'll know about the bat cave. It's an enormous dark hangar filled with different sorts …

Paradise Wildlife park is the granddad of all experience days. It's one of the first zoos to really embrace animal experiences as a way of letting visitors get closer and more involved with the animals.

As a result, their range of animal experiences is second to none and thoroughly enjoyable, informative and provide a superb day out. Experiencey staff have personally taken about three or four experiences in the park, including the famous 'tickle a tapir' experience. And we paid for them all ourselves, before you accuse us of favouritism :-)

The animals are well-cared-for and enclosed in environments as near to their natural surroundings as you can get in a park of this size.

It's a lovely small park with a few nice animals including penguins and otters. The park only runs one type of animal experience day, but it's good news for red panda fans because they run one of the UK's favourite red panda experiences.

Red pandas are one of the perennial favourites, in the same way as meerkats and lemurs. We're always seeing a lot of demand for red panda experiences, and it's only getting greater as other locations tend to sell out quite early in the season.

Now this experience is a bit more expensive than your average red panda meet and greet, but there's a £25 donation to the Red Panda Network for each Red Panda Experience booked. According to the park, you'll get to feed, stroke and even get sat on by the red pandas, and that's a lot more contact than you get in a lot of si…