Yigal Horowitz, the veterinarian of Ramat Gan's Safari park, has been aiming tranquilizer darts at the park's young zebras for the past two days. He first identifies them from within the herd, which roams freely in a 1,000-dunam (250-acre) expanse, takes aim and fires.

"I have been shooting [animals] for 16 years already," Horowitz says. "It is a matter of skill."

A few minutes after the dart makes contact, the animal is asleep. The park's team has been awaiting precisely this moment. The sedated animal is lifted onto a flatbed trailer hitched to a vehicle and transported to a treatment area, where it will be administered preventative medications against parasites and then woken.

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Eight young zebras, aged 8 months to 2 years, will be kept in a quarantine enclosure for a few weeks, until they are loaded onto a plane bound for the Chiang Mai region of Thailand, where a large safari park is being developed. The Thailand park recently contacted the Ramat Gan Safari, asking to purchase 20 zebras at $20,000 each.

Surprisingly, the Ramat Gan safari is an outstanding exporter of animals to safari parks worldwide. Thus a tigress was sent to a zoo in New Zealand - free of charge, as this animal is in danger of extinction; two gorillas, Aladdin and Leon, were sent to Tenerife; two elephants traveled to Hungary and two lions and two zebras were sold to Jordan.

"There aren't many zoos in the world with herds the size of ours," Horowitz says. "Most zoos have two or three zebras, or at the most a herd of 20. We have about 100, which is a huge number."

Safari officials say the park's large area encourages the animals to breed "just like in nature." The zebras are not the only ones multiplying in comfort. In addition to the 13 families of zebras are herds of African and Eland antelope, gnu and Thompson Antelope.

For the journey to Thailand, the zebras, whose weight ranges from about 140 kilograms to 250 kilograms, will be sedated, put into specially built wooden crates and loaded in the cargo hold of a regular passenger plane.

Budget balancer

The sale of animals helps balance the Safari's budget, making it almost independent from municipal budget allocations despite being a commercial subsidiary of the Tel Aviv and Ramat Gan municipalities. The Safari has about 70 regular employees and another 150 temporary workers. Most of its annual budget of about NIS 22 million is covered by revenues. Nearly half a million people visit the Safari annually, paying an entrance fee of NIS 49 each.

"Thanks to the sales of animals," a Safari spokesperson says, "we can continue developing the park. Our next project is to transfer the giraffes from an enclosure in the zoo section into the Safari's open space, so that we can move the tigresses into the zoo. This project costs hundreds of thousands of dollars," the spokesperson said.

Horowitz, 48, has been the park's vet since 1990. "The climate here," he explains, "suits the zebras very well and is the reason for their excellent reproduction rate. Also, when there is a large herd, quite a surplus is created and we can meet the demand from zoos all over the world."

Another reason for the popularity of Safari's zebras is that European and international zoo associations prefer to purchase or swap animals, rather than hunt them in Africa, mainly because they do not want to reduce the populations in the wild.

"There is also the matter of the animals' health," Horowitz continues. "Zoos prefer to receive animals from a country they know has veterinary supervision, where they can be certain the animals are treated properly and are free of disease."

The health issue is of concern to national governments as well as the zoos. For that reason, animal exchanges are arranged between governments, by means of signed agreements, rather than privately, between zoos.

Relations between zoos, as with those between countries, are affected by politics. Naturally, the Ramat Gan Safari cannot naturally not trade, sell or transfer animals with any country with which Israel does not have diplomatic ties. Even so, Horowitz says that sometimes connections are made through a third country.

"I don't recall exactly which countries were involved," says Horowitz cautiously, "but there are some [Persian] Gulf States that received animals from Israel."