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I was learning to track rhinoceroses in Africa and tracked right up on an animal that really I thought was going to kill me.

I felt like a hunted animal, followed constantly, waiting to be killed.

When I was 15, I went on a cricket tour of Zimbabwe with my school. My defining memory of it was stroking a semi-tame lioness at a game reserve. I grew up on a farm, so I felt I had an affinity with animals, and when it put a paw out, I thought I'd connected with it. But its claws came out and nicked my leg. Then I did the most stupid thing: I ran.

Funnily enough, the most danger I felt was when I did a story about exotic animals kept as pets in America.

I'd say the best is when I was in Africa, I saw a hippo in a house. Someone had a pet hippo. And they're meant to be one of the most dangerous animals on the planet, and they had one that was sort of just wandering in and out of their house, just sort of roaming about.

I have two brothers and we basically spent our lives playing in the woods, falling in ponds, getting chased by wasps and riding donkeys that we shouldn't have been riding.

Animals have never betrayed me. They are an easy prey, as I have been throughout my career. So we feel the same. I love them.

I was once, I think, bitten on the nose by a lion cub.

I have snakes, three sharks, moray eels, piranhas, five scorpions and a bird spider. All of them are predators. They are dangerous but it's cool to have strong and powerful pets.

Once I climbed into a mountain lion's cage and she bounded at me and put her paw on my face, but she kept her claws withdrawn.