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Why Yaks?

Interior, Alaska has temperature extremes with hot summers and bitter cold winters, and low precipitation year-round. Yaks are hearty, easy keepers that thrive in our climate due to their high-altitude adaptations.  Yaks are useful in many ways. They can be great source of lean meat and high fat milk. They are good companions but also very complimentary with our northern off-grid lifestyle. They produce incredible fiber (we wear lots of wool), they can be trained to pull sleds or haul logs out of the woods (we heat our home primarily with wood harvested from our property).  

About Yaks

Yaks, Bos grunniens, are bovids, related to other ruminants such as cattle, bison, and muskox. Wild yaks originated in the Himalayas between 5 and 2.5 million years ago and only 15,000 exist in the wild today (Jing et al 2022, Liu 2023). Yaks were domesticated at least 3,000 years ago in Tibet, though some studies have indicated domestication may have been earlier (Chen et al 2023). Communities in the Asian highlands from Tibet to Mongolia rely on yaks for meat, milk, fiber, leather, dung for fuel, plowing, riding, packing and significant roles in religious ceremonies (Jing et al 2022). Yaks were imported into the US in the late1800s as zoo animals (Livestock Conservancy 2024; Porter et al 2020) but now are very valuable livestock animals that appear on farms throughout the country. Find more information at USYaks – A Science Based Registry 

Yak Adaptations

Yaks, native to the Asian Highlands, are adapted to live in extreme cold and harsh conditions. Some of these adaptations include: larger and specially shaped heart and lungs for low oxygen conditions allowing their vascular constriction response to be much lower than other domesticated ruminants, low surface area to body mass ratio for heat retention, three layers of fur (guard hairs, fine wool 20-50 microns, and finest down wool 16-20microns), efficient metabolism that slows in cold air temperatures to allow them to conserve energy while still maintaining body temperature, ability to consume snow for hydration, and much more (Jing et al 2022; Bittel 2015).

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