The scimitar-horned oryx went extinct in the wild because of their meat and leather, but recently they have been re-released into the wild Sahara because of a successful captive breeding program. 

The scimitar-horned oryx is a large herbivorous animal that mostly lives naturally in Saharan Africa. The animal gets most of its water from the plants that it eats so that it doesn’t need to search across the desert for any exposed water sources. They are well adapted to take the immense amount of heat. The types of plants that they eat are various types of grasses and desert shrubs. They are more than 4 and a half feet tall at the shoulder and weigh up to 200 pounds. They are preyed on by many popular African predators that include lions, leopards, hyenas, and African wild dogs. 

One benefit that this animal has had to return to its environment is because of how many places that they are kept in captivity. The oryx has been kept in captivity on hunting reserves, private animal collections, and most importantly, zoos. This meant that though the population was small, the large variety of genetics from the people getting these animals at different times. 

You may have heard that most captive animals cannot be returned to the wild because they lose their habits. This is especially true with mammals because they are generally more intelligent and adapt to stay in their new environment. This is unlike animals like fish or reptiles because they live as they would in the wild in captivity with the place that they live being about the same as if they were to live in the wild. For the condition of the scimitar-horned oryx, its captive conditions generally are quite similar to that of the wild because rather than being fed, they usually are kept on a large plot of land with the grasses and other plants that they eat. 

A major helper to keep the oryx population alive was a group of ranchers in the western part of Texas that heard about the situation with the animals in the 1970s. They decided to set aside a lot of land and transfer some of the scimitar-horned oryx to this land. Over time, this population has reached more than 12,000 of the animals which is a larger population than that which has ever lived in Africa. 

The other captive populations that went into re-releasing these animals back into Africa with the Texas ranchers was a system of zoos and a small collection of the animals that are held by the royal family of Abu Dhabi. The zoo network for the scimitar-horned oryx was started in Britain and continued networking until 3295 of the oryx were raised across 182 different zoos across the world. 

There were animals that were selected from each of the major herds around the world to be re-released. They were selected by which of them would have the right diversity of genetics for the new herd and based on which of them had the best chances of survival. The countries that have had scimitar-horned oryx released so far are Morocco, Tunisia, and Chad. There are plans to continue releasing animals into more places in the future.