Its habitat is increasingly being degraded for agricultural purposes and it is persecuted by the Bedouin. The most serious threat it faces may be that it hybridises with feral domestic cats, and there may be few pure-bred Arabian wildcats remaining in the wild. With this in mind, a captive breeding program was started in 1986 in Abu Dhabi, and other cats have been relocated to California and Germany, with an international studbook being kept at Cologne Zoological Garden.[5]