Hyrum family adds pet yak to their farm

HYRUM, Cache County (AP) — There's a critter in the back yard with a hump like a buffalo. Her tail is thick and bushy, like a horse's, and her feet have two toes, like a cow's.

Which makes her — give up? — a yak.

A real, live yak, like the kind you read about traipsing through the mountains of Tibet, not chewing her cud on a treelined street in Hyrum.

Her name is Jasmine, if you'd like to be introduced.

"She has to have an interesting name — she's an interesting animal," says Rochelle Pound as she scratches the yak's horned head.

There's the purple tongue, that's interesting.

The dark shaggy hair that will grow like a "skirt" around her legs. And that yak sound, just a low, soft grunt — making Jasmine not too yakety at all.

A yak in the yard is a curiosity, to be sure, an animal that some are surprised to discover actually exists.

"Dr. Seuss talks about yaks, but you never think they're real," says Rochelle, who bottle-fed this bovine when she was just a baby.

Jasmine lives with the Wesley and Brenda Pound family and a menagerie of alpacas, goats, sheep, rabbits, chickens, bees, cats and a dog named Toby. Skilled in the fiber arts, the Pounds raise many of the critters for their hair, fleece or fur, which can be spun into yarn.

Yak hair is very soft, like cashmere, Wes says, pulling a wispy tuft off Jasmine's back. It sells for around $30 an ounce, compared with $20 a pound for fine wool. However, Jasmine isn't too keen on parting with her coat. She doesn't stand still for brushing and gets impatient when family members pluck clumps of hair off her.

"It comes loose with no effort," Wes says, demonstrating again, but, "It just tickles."

The Pounds moved back to their home state last year from Reno, Nev., settling in on this 1 1/2-acre spread next door to Brenda's mother.

They got Jasmine before the move from a yak breeder in Nevada, in exchange for bottle-feeding some of his baby yaks to help tame them.

Jasmine, who was about a week old and weighed around 40 pounds, started with three feedings a day from large calf bottles, filled with a powdered formula for baby yaks that mixes with water.

"You'd rub her underneath her chin and she'd start eating," remembers daughter Rochelle, 18, who now gets "kisses" on her pant leg from Jasmine's purple tongue.

At 1 year old, Jasmine stands about 3 feet tall at the shoulder and still has more growing to do. Over the next two years, she'll likely gain another 2 feet in height and weigh 900 to 1,000 pounds.

The full-grown yaks in Nevada were so big, Rochelle says, "I could put my whole fist in their nose."