The Gorillarium at Howletts Zoo, near the cathedral city of Canterbury in the southern English county of Kent, is about as good as it gets. If you are a captive gorilla. Or if you want to see one.

While many zoos feed their gorillas with a sort of innocuous cattle cake -- nutritious but hardly Jamie Oliver -- the gorillas here enjoy a diet of at least 150 different foodstuffs. Fresh strawberries in season, ripe mangoes, paw paws, nuts, fresh celery, herbs -- you care to name it, and they probably get it. A balanced diet par excellence!

They also have plenty of grubs, beetles, harvest mites, ticks and other creepy-crawlies. That is because none of the zoo keepers bother cleaning the Gorillarium floor on a daily basis. In fact, they only get around to changing the oat straw once every two or three years.

At first glance, this laissez-faire approach to housekeeping -- with up to 40 gorillas in residence, and the straw more than a meter deep -- might seem like the sort of sad neglect that characterizes so many zoos. But the filthy floor is a deliberate Howletts policy. One of many policies that have earned the establishment a reputation for rule-breaking on a grand, going on revolutionary, scale.

Busy with social interaction

What is special about Howletts is the "sheer nerve of it," one Web site admiringly noted.

I'd agree. And the floor is a case in point.

In the wild, gorillas spend long hours sifting through jungle leaf-litter for nutritious bugs. It keeps them fed. It keeps them busy with social interaction -- Hey, sonny! That's my grub! Wait till you're a silverback and can outwrestle me! Then it's your grub! Right now it's mine! And I'm going to give it to my wife!

They do the same here. The decomposing straw not only gives off heat that keeps the great apes warm throughout the year, but it also serves as a natural environment for insects (hiding) and gorillas (seeking). The keepers increase the interest of the treasure hunt by scattering and concealing food.

Boredom is one of the many woes that plague caged animals. Not here. These gorillas are occupied! They also have their own elevated bedrooms, swings, tunnels and lots of people to wrestle.

Howletts places emphasis on keeper-animal interaction -- which is why it has been dubbed "The Zoo of Death" by one of Britain's tabloid newspapers. To date, two keepers have been killed by the tigers, but Howletts' founder, John Aspinall, remained defiant in his "play with the animals" policy. When, at age 74, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer of the jaw, he even attempted to get himself eaten by one of his own tigers.

This rather flamboyant method of self-inflicted, tiger-assisted euthanasia was deemed inappropriate by the powers that be, but the idea was classic Aspinall. Totally unorthodox. And in a weird way quite logical. Why be cremated when you can provide an endangered species that you love with a nourishing meal?

Although Aspinall is now dead, the man's spirit still looms large over Howletts and its nearby sister zoo, Port Lympne.

Aspinall was born in India; conceived by his mother with her soldier lover under a tree during a British army mess ball (while her husband perhaps waltzed the night away in blissful ignorance). He went to Oxford University, but when he realized that the races at Royal Ascot clashed with his Final exams he decided to abandon academia for a promising little horse he'd had his eye on for some time. It won.

Aspinall was a gambler, a dilettante, a carousing high-roller; a man who hired dwarves to perform on trapeze gear above one of his banquets; a man who won fortunes, lost them just as quickly, then won them back. A man who spent happy times in the Swinging Sixties sharing baths with champagne, wild women and wilder tigers in London penthouse suites. Indeed, he shared a bed with a young tigress called Tara for 18 months.

Fleece the aristocracy

Aspinall was the sort of man who would have made a first-class James Bond super-villain if his inclinations and talents had led him to crime. He had a streak of it in him. He has been accused of holding vaguely pro-Nazi eugenicist views -- one of his obituaries referred to him as a misanthropic rogue; not a nice man -- and said that he would be dismissed as some kind of nasty freak and we'd all be glad he was dead.

The same obituary then changed its position. Aspinall, despite his tendency to run illegal gambling clubs and fleece the British aristocracy at cards, was acknowledged as founding two zoos that under his philosophy became, by far, the most successful places anywhere at breeding tigers and gorillas.

Aspinall had no educational background in biology or zoology. No doctorates. And not much tact. That is why his two zoos attract so much resentment from some in the zoo establishment -- and so many mixed responses from the media and primate conservationists.

You love them or you hate them. I loved them. So did all the visitors I interviewed.

Both zoos were built with Aspinall's gambling winnings. They are located in a particularly beautiful part of "the garden of England," as Kent is known, and while the English countryside, the renovated country houses and sculptured lawns are in themselves good reasons for visiting, the placid rural idylls are considerably livened up by herds of elephants roaming very English fields and rhinos wandering about to the background sound of howling wolves and other large predators.

The animals here are often rare, endangered or tottering close to the abyss of extinction. They are very comfortable. They are breeding and they are being released back into the wild.

You may not see some of them. Their enclosures are designed with them and their comfort in mind. But you are guaranteed a thought-provoking, fascinating day out. You can bet on it.