11:50am UK, Wednesday December 23, 2009Dominic Waghorn, Middle East correspondent
A safari park in Israel is looking for loving homes for hippos this festive season after a baby boom among its residents.
"Mud, mud, glorious mud. Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood," goes the song, but the opposite seems to be true at Ramat Gan safari park near Tel Aviv.
An abundance of mud and other factors seem to have warmed the ardour of its hippos to boiling point.
The park has undergone a breeding bonanza and is now coping with a surplus of the huge riverine beasts.
"They are very fertile animals." Safari zoologist Amelia Turkel told Sky News.
"The pregnancy is short for such large animals. It's only eight months. So a female can have one calf every year."
Ms Turkel and colleagues believe the warm Israeli sunshine and the park's watering hole ape conditions in Africa so well that the hippos are as relaxed and amorous as they would be in the wild.
What began as a group of five hippos is now a herd of more than 40.
The hippo baby boom at Ramat Gan has required urgent and extreme remedies.
As with humans, too many hippos in one place causes social problems.
"We were having social issues with them so it was a good thing to try and see if we could find homes for the young males and young females," the zoologist said of the fights that began breaking out between young adults.
"We could see the results of these fights because they would be scarred up the next morning.
"They have these enormous incisors and there are four of them in their mouths. (They are) very wide and very sharp and these teeth can inflict serious damage on other hippos."
The solution has been to ship the surplus hippos to loving homes in zoos worldwide making Ramat Gan the world's biggest exporter of the animals.
It is no easy task. The hippos must be sedated at night as far away as possible from the park's lake to avoid them running into the water and drowning.
The three-and-a-half-ton beasts are then lifted by bulldozer and put in crates. The smaller ones can be flown overseas. Bigger ones go by ship.
Fourteen hippos have been sent to countries as far and wide as Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Turkey and Ukraine.
There is apparently a long waiting list, but with Ramat Gan's enviably high breeding rate, there are plenty more where they came from.
See video and photo gallery at: http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Tel-Avivs-Ramat-Gan-Safari-Park-Looking-For-New-Homes-After-Hippo-Breeding-Excess/Article/200912415507016?f=rss
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