Four soft-eyed, cream-colored antelopes with enormous knobby horns frisked in the Phoenix Maytag Zoo last week under constant, anxious watch by their keeper. They are Arabian oryxes, some of the world's rarest animals, and if they thrive in the desert climate of Arizona, they may live to be the only oryxes left on earth.
Oryxes are in trouble in Araby be cause of the local conviction that the horns of an oryx give sexual vigor when ground into powder and eaten. Today oil-rich Arabs are so eager for vigor that they chase down oryxes in high-powered cars or even in airplanes, and slaughter them with machine guns. As a result, hardly an oryx is left alive in its native desert.
Last year, to foil the vigor seekers, the Fauna Preservation Society of Lon don launched Operation Oryx. Led by Major Ian R. Grimwood, chief game warden of Kenya Colony, an expedition of oryx savers spent two months in the deserts of Aden Protectorate in southern Arabia. They sighted four oryxes, lassoed three of them from a specially built car and brought them safely back alive.
After a long investigation, Major Grimwood decided that the best place for a "world herd" of Arab-proof oryxes was not in Kenya, but in Phoenix, where the dry, hot climate resembles that of Arabia, and where there is the spacious and hospitable Maytag Zoo. The Arizona Air National Guard, happy to boost the home state, flew a C-97 cargo plane to pick up the oryxes, which had been shipped to New Jersey. The four consisted of two males and two females, Edith from Aden, and Caroline, contributed by the London Zoo. Another female, still unnamed, will arrive at the end of summer, a gift of Sheik Abdulla Al-Jabir As-Sabah of Kuwait.
Never were visitors treated with more tender care. While they get used to their new surroundings, the oryxes are kept in semi-isolation and watched constantly by zoo officials. All food and water equipment is sterilized, and the few visitors admitted to the enclosures are made to dunk their shoes in an antiseptic solution to keep out infection. To protect the oryxes from unfamiliar thorns, all cacti except giant saguaros have been removed, and the thorns of the saguaros have been clipped to a height above the reach of an oryx. Every day the zoo fills out a sheet for each animal, listing weather, temperature, food and water consumed, bowel movements, breeding (none so far). The little world herd seems to be doing fine, although Caroline, the female from London, suffered at first from the Arizona heat. Edith may be pregnant, but it did not happen in Phoenix. Until the oryxes are fully acclimated, the males and females are being kept strictly apart.