Motorised hunting removed the Arabian oryx from its desert range through the mid-twentieth century, and the last confirmed wild animals were killed in Oman in the early 1970s. A small number had been taken into captivity beforehand, forming the founder stock of a breeding programme built around a herd assembled in the United States, together with animals from private collections in Arabia.
Reintroduction began in Oman in 1982 and later extended to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel and Jordan. Wild and free-roaming numbers recovered into the low thousands. In 2011 the IUCN reclassified the species from Extinct in the Wild to Vulnerable, the first time a species had made that particular recovery.
The story is not uncomplicated. Oman's Arabian Oryx Sanctuary was delisted as a World Heritage site in 2007 after the protected area was reduced and the local population fell under renewed poaching, the first delisting of its kind. Recovery has depended on continuous protection rather than a one-off release, and much of the population remains in fenced or intensively managed areas.