Wild yak
Bos mutus
— Where the name comes from
Yak is the Tibetan g.yag, which however originally means only the male: the female is dri, and in Tibetan to ask for “yak milk” is a small linguistic absurdity that Westerners repeat everywhere. The Latin epithet mutus, “mute”, separates the wild form from the domestic one, Bos grunniens, “the grunting ox”: the domesticated animal is noisy, the wild one nearly silent.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Even-toed ungulates
- Habitat
- High plateau, alpine steppe between 4,000 and 6,000 metres
- Range
- The Tibetan plateau: western China and northern India
- Size
- 250–330 cm long, 500–1,200 kg
- Diet
- Herbivore — tough grasses, lichens, high-altitude mosses
- Lifespan
- 20–25 years
— Characteristics
- 01
Its blood carries oxygen twice as efficiently as that of lowland cattle.
- 02
The coat has an undercoat so dense that the animal endures −40 °C, but suffers already above 15.
- 03
It has no developed sweat glands: it sheds heat almost entirely by breathing.
— What sets it apart
Without it the Tibetan plateau would have stayed uninhabited. The domestic yak — descended from this animal — supplies milk, meat, wool, leather, transport and, in dried dung, the only fuel available where no tree grows: in a place that offers no wood, a herbivore becomes the source of heat. The wild populations, meanwhile, have fallen to a few thousand head, threatened not least by interbreeding with the domestic herds descended from them.
