HAIFA, Israel — The baboons got stressed, the lions got fat, and zoo officials worry that the antelopes might have heart attacks.

After 34 days in indoor shelters, many of the animals at the Haifa Zoo got a breath of outdoor air, if not a taste of freedom, for the first time yesterday.

Zoo officials moved all the carnivores, bears, and monkeys indoors at the start of the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, both to protect them from rocket strikes and to keep an errant missile on a retaining wall from setting them loose into Israel’s third-largest city.

“The lions gained weight, but they look basically okay,” the zoo’s manager, Etty Ararat, said as he released them outdoors yesterday. Hours before, the lions roared and flashed their teeth at reporters who visited them at the 3-meter by 2-meter indoor cages where they were confined for more than a month.

“Baboons suffered from stress,” Mr. Ararat said.

Most of all, he worried about the more fragile animals, like the gazelles, who had to stay outside while thousands of explosions went off around them.

“These animals sometimes die instantly from a heart attack several weeks after they were traumatized,” he said.

While indoors, zoo officials were forced to get creative to keep the animals from going crazy.

“We hung sacks of meat on the ceilings of the leopards’ and tigers’ cages so they had to jump to get them,” a zookeeper, Yoav Ratner, said. The handlers stuffed pumpkins full of meat, he added. They filled bamboo poles with jelly “so the monkeys had to do a bit of work to get the jelly,” he said.

July and August, usually the busiest months for visitors, were completely wiped out financially because of the war.

“We had no revenues, and I had a lot of extra expenses,” Mr. Ararat said. Those included buying meat the zoo usually got for free because markets had shut down and buying tranquilizers in case one of the animals got loose in the city, he said.