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Early Casualties of the Industry
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Fewer than 300 oryxes remain at the smaller sanctuary. Most, females and their young, are confined to pens. They trot after the hay and alfalfa Bedouin employees hurl to them from the back of pickup trucks twice a day.
Poaching, a grave threat to the oryx long before Oman reduced the size of the sanctuary, remains an immediate danger.
Middle East sheiks value the Arabian oryx as a symbol of a time when the desert was at least as important as the city in this part of the world. They pay up to $20,000 on the black market for a female oryx, said Salah Said Mahdhouri, a biologist at the sanctuary.
At the height of poaching on the sanctuary, "it was a nightmare" for workers here, Mahdhouri said. "Every night they wondered, 'What will we find in the morning?' " Today, about 60 males remain outside the pen, prey to connoisseurs seeking to better their private zoos and to Omanis hungry for oryx meat.
Oman is maintaining a zero-growth policy for the oryx herd "until we can figure out this poaching problem," Mahdhouri said ruefully, riding on the roof of a green pickup as it rolled ahead of the plodding oryx at feeding time.
Zoologists for years had pointed to the sanctuary as one of the success stories of efforts to save animals from extinction and return them to nature.
Hunting rendered the Arabian oryx extinct in the wild by the 1970s. Zoologists gathered nine of the last confined oryx for a breeding program at the Phoenix Zoo in Arizona.
In 1982, zoologists were able to return members of the reinvigorated herd to the oryx sanctuary.
The sanctuary holds other species: Arabian gazelles, Nubian ibex with giant horns swooping back over their heads, ungainly-looking desert bustards, called houbara. Except for the gazelles, the bigger animals, living outside the oryx pen, are "endangered, heading to extinct," Mahdhouri said.
