15/09/2026
THE CASE FOR HUNTING
The scimitar-horned oryx was declared extinct in the wild in Africa in 2000. At the time, more than 11,000 of them were alive on Texas trophy ranches. The species had once ranged across the grasslands and semidesert of North Africa. Unregulated hunting, drought, livestock pressure, war, and habitat loss reduced herds that had numbered in the hundreds of thousands to scattered remnants.
By the late 1980s, no confirmed wild population remained. The International Union for Conservation of Nature formally classified the species as Extinct in the Wild in 2000.
Texas offered a very different set of conditions. Scimitar-horned oryx tolerated the heat, bred readily on open ranchland, and carried horns that made them valuable to trophy hunters. Ranch owners could charge several thousand dollars for a hunt, giving every breeding female and surviving calf a financial value. Maintaining large herds required land, feed, fencing, veterinary care, and protection, all of which could be paid for by selling a limited number of hunts.
Most ranchers were operating businesses rather than species-recovery programs. Even so, their herds expanded while the African population disappeared. The result became one of the more uncomfortable cases in modern conservation: an animal could be legally shot in Texas while being listed as extinct everywhere it had once lived naturally.
Federal regulation briefly threatened that system. In 2005, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service exempted captive-bred scimitar-horned oryx, addax, and dama gazelles from some Endangered Species Act permit requirements. A federal court later ruled that the blanket exemption violated the law, and the agency removed it in 2012. Ranchers then needed individual permits for activities involving the animals, including hunts.
The restriction lasted two years. Congress ordered the exemption restored, and the Fish and Wildlife Service reinstated it in 2014. Supporters argued that making the animals harder to sell would make ranchers less willing to keep them. Opponents objected to using the killing of endangered animals as a conservation tool. The Texas herds continued to be bred and hunted.
Their role in the species’ return to Africa was real, although less direct than the Texas hunting industry sometimes suggests. The animals released in Chad came from a genetically managed herd assembled in Abu Dhabi from collections in the United Arab Emirates, Europe, and the United States. Fossil Rim Wildlife Center in Texas contributed 18 oryx to that herd and helped test the GPS collars used to monitor released animals. It is a nonprofit conservation center, not a commercial trophy ranch, but its animals belonged to the larger North American population that had grown alongside the Texas hunting herds.
In March 2016, the first 25 oryx were flown from Abu Dhabi to the Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim Faunal Reserve in Chad. They spent several months in an acclimation enclosure before being released during the rainy season. Each carried a satellite collar, allowing researchers to follow an animal that nobody had studied as a free-ranging wild species for decades.
One female left the herd in September and gave birth alone, normal behavior for the species. Her calf was probably the first scimitar-horned oryx born in the wild in more than 30 years.
Further releases followed. By 2023, 285 captive-bred oryx had been moved to Chad, and births on the reserve had increased the free-ranging population to more than 600. That year, the IUCN changed the species’ status from Extinct in the Wild to Endangered. The animals now living on the Sahel include descendants of herds maintained in Abu Dhabi, European zoos, American conservation centers, and a Texas population whose extraordinary growth was funded largely by hunters.
Image is for illustration purposes only
Source: IUCN Red List / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service / Environment Agency Abu Dhabi / Sahara Conservation / Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute / Fossil Rim Wildlife Center / Exotic Wildlife Association / Los Angeles Times.
