Arabian Oryx Sanctuary eliminated

JAALUNI, Oman -- One early loser in Oman's 
rush to boost dwindling oil
production is a doe-eyed, 
snowy-white creature that medieval
storytellers
tended to mistake for a unicorn.

In 2007, concerned by his country's 
yearly drop in oil output, Sultan
Qaboos bin Said asked UNESCO to delete 
from its list of World Heritage sites
Oman's more than 10,000-square-mile 
sanctuary for the endangered Arabian oryx,
a long-horned antelope.

In a decree, Qaboos also cut the 
preserve's territory by 90 percent.
Officials said the smaller size made 
the preserve more manageable.
UNESCO's World Heritage commission 
acceded.

By the time of the site's removal, 
oil and gas exploration within the
old boundaries already had cost the 
preserve "its outstanding universal
value," the International Union for the 
Conservation of Nature said.

Oman's oryx sanctuary is the only site 
to have been scrubbed from the
World Heritage list.

"In layman's terms, the country decided 
it had another priority for the
land," Christina Cameron, chairwoman of 
the UNESCO World Heritagecommittee,
said by telephone from Canada. "We were 
told hydrocarbon exploration."

Canada opposed the sanctuary's removal from
the list. The United States supported 
Oman's request.

Four years earlier, Shell, one of the 
government's partners in the Petroleum
Development Oman consortium, became the 
first major oil company to pledge to
avoid drilling on World Heritage sites. 
Removal of the site from the list
removed the objection.

Last year, the state-controlled oil 
company drilled two exploratory
wells a few miles outside the new, smaller 
boundaries of the preserve. As in a test
before the site became a World Heritage site 
in 1994, the test indicated the oil there 
was too thick to feasibly produce.

Although international coverage of the move
was limited, regional news media
linked it to a subsequent government 
shake-up of Oman's environmental
ministry.

Khalifa al-Hinai, an adviser with Oman's 
Oil and Gas Ministry, declined to
comment last month on the exploration in 
the oryx sanctuary. "It's a touchy
subject," he said.

The oryx is a large, white-skinned beast 
with black patches. Both of its
thin, slightly spiraled horns jut straight 
from its head at the same
angle.
In profile, the two horns look like one. 
Many scholars believe the oryx's
appearance gave rise to the myth of 
the unicorn.

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.

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Suzanne Bilello
Senior Public Information and Liaison 
Officer 
UNESCO Office in New York
2 United Nations Plaza Room 900

New York, NY 10017

Note that the US supported reduction of the
Oryx sanctuary in favor of oil and gas!!!!!!