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USFWS staff with two red wolf pups bred in captivity

Captive breeding the process of breeding endangered animals by capturing them from their natural environment, breeding them in restricted conditions in zoos and other conservation facilities, and releasing them back to the wild when the population stabilizes and the threat to the animal in the wild is lessened or removed.

This technique has been used with great success for many animal species for quite a while, with probably the oldest known such instances of captive breeding being attributed to menageries of European and Asian rulers, a case in point being the Pere David's Deer. The idea was popularized among modern conservationists independently by Peter Scott and Gerald Durrell in the 1950s and 1960s, founders of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust and Jersey Zoo - who demonstrated considerable success with a wide variety of life forms in the 1970s ranging from birds (eg. Pink Pigeon), mammals (eg. Pigmy Hog), reptiles (eg. Round Island Boa) and amphibians (eg. Poison arrow frogs). Their ideas were independently validated by the success of Operation Oryx (under the auspices of the Fauna and Flora Preservation Society), which successfully captive bred the Arabian Oryx in 1962 and reintroduced them back into Arabia.

Such techniques are usually difficult to implement for highly mobile species like some migratory birds (eg. cranes) and fishes (eg. Hilsa).

If the captive breeding population is too small, inbreeding may occur due to reduced gene pool, which may lead to the population lacking immunity to diseases and other problems. Over sufficient number of generations, inbred populations can regain "normal" genetic diversity.

The Przewalski's horse has recently been re-introduced to the wild in Mongolia, its native habitat.