We, the Yaks

Declaration on the welfare of

the High Asia´s native cattle

DRAFT VERSION

elaborated by
Santiago J. Carralero Benítez

YURTA Association
www.nomadicpeople.org
 INTRODUCTION, MOTIVATION, GOAL

Introduction
We, the Yaks, are an unique multi-purpose semi-domesticated animal native of the Tibetan plateau
and spread throughout the surrounding mountain areas. We were domesticated around 4,000 years
ago, but we keep a semi-wild nature which allow us to defend ourselves from predators and the
prevalent harsh climate and geographic conditions. Our nature and the fact that we are one of the
most useful and complete animals for the humans living there have made us an emblematic element
of the high-altitude ecosystem in Asia, though we are also one of the less well-known genus of
bovids out of our homeland. This is due to our relativily low quantity, in comparison with other
grazing animals, and because of our remoteness and specific location. However, we aim to be
worlwide known as we represent much more than just a grazing animal but an environmental icon
too. We really wish the world to discover our precious homeland as a transboundary regional unit
beyond political borders and its related cultural divergences, as it once was. We wish people to
understand the role we play in its management as well as our ways of operating over the alpine
grasslands on the highest plateaus and at the shadow of the highest mountains on Earth. We are not
only an inherent part of this fragile but maginificent ecosystem but also a key piece to keep balance
on it, and this balance represents a decisive contribution on global atmospheric circulation as well
as the adequate maintenance of the World´s largest fluvial network, from which almost half of the
total population relies to some extent. Therefore we are not merely animals from a region, as our
lives decisively contribute to the welfare of many others, including human communities.
Our homeland has been called High Asia, an inmense territory at high altitude that constitutes the
very heart of Asia, including drylands, steppes, and humid grasslands located between 2,000-3,500
and 4,000-5,500 meters of altitude, depending from latitude and a combination of climate and
geographic factors. This homogenous succession of high plateaus, mountains and valleys has been
politically divided among countries and states for centuries, from Mongolia in the north to Nepal in
the south, from Kyrgyzstan in the west to China in the East. For this reason, we are also called
Tsarlag (yak) and Khainag (yak hybrids) by Mongols, Topos by Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, and Nor and
Dri (yak male and female) by some of the Tibetans. In our homeland and in the fringes of our
homelands we have shared pasturelands with other grazing animals: goats and sheeps, horses and
mules, cows and buffaloes, camels and reindeers, but we cannot survive from short grasses and
hawthorns as sheeps and goats go, to live in the lowlands as cows and buffaloes do, to survive in
very arid or polar conditions, as camels and reindeers do. Our main predator, the snow leopard is
other iconic inhabitant from High Asia, while the Tibetan mastiff protect our cubs from them.
 Motivation
First, we feel certainly worried to see how, still in the XXI Century, there is not a specific
international legislation for the animal welfare to be operative and globally acepted. The Universal
Declaration on Animal Welfare (UDAW) has been, for the moment, the only consistent initiative but
it is still in the study phase within the United Nations. The UDAW have been proposed as an inter-
governmental agreement to recognise that animals are sentient, to prevent cruelty and reduce
suffering, and to promote standards on the our welfare. The UDAW has been promoted by a group
of animal welfare organizations, particularly the World Animal Protection and, as of 2014, the
petition has over 2.5 million signatures and support from people in a variety of UN member states.
Among the scanty legislation drafted to protect our rights as animals at a supra-national level we
have found the European Convention for the Protection of Pet Animals, a treaty of the Council of
Europe to promote the welfare of pet animals and ensure minimum standards for their treatment and
protection. The treaty was signed in 1987 and became effective on 1 May 1992, after at least four
countries had ratified it. Adherence to the treaty is open and not limited to member countries of the
Council of Europe.
For our free brothers, the wild animals, from all we come from, we know of the existence of the
Bern Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats, also known as the
Bern Convention (or Berne Convention), being a binding international legal instrument in the field
of Nature Conservation, and covering the natural heritage in Europe, as well as in some African
countries. In Africa, the Convention for the Preservation of Wild Animals, Birds and Fish (also
known as the London Convention of 1900), is a multilateral treaty on wildlife preservation that has
been signed by the European colonial powers in London in 1900. Although it never entered into
force, it has nevertheless been recognised as one of history's earliest agreements on nature
conservation.
Finally, we have found only one example of legislation on wildlife at global level, although
restricted to the migratory species, and not all of them. Under this category only some of the many
migratory species are included, whereas all of the mobile grazing animals, in which category we are
included, whether semi-wild or semi-domesticated, have been excluded. The Convention on the
Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals, or Bonn Convention, aims to conserve
terrestrial, marine and avian migratory species throughout their range. It is an international treaty,
concluded under the aegis of the United Nations Environment Programme, concerned with the
conservation of wildlife and habitats on a global scale. But we wonder what happen with those, like
us, keeping a semi-wild or semi-domesticated status and a traditional migratory pattern too?
As an initial conclusion, we emphasize the need of taking into account that even if endorsed by the
UN (as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was), the UDAW, which is the most promising
initiative in global animal protection, it would be a non-binding set of principles that acknowledges
the importance of the sentience of animals and human responsibilities towards them. Therefore, and
in spite that since the late Neolithic period, we, the domesticated and semi-domestic animals, have
served and enabled human to survive or substantially improve our life standars in many different
areas and ways, we are not being properly protected as an universal comunity of species from the
frequently abusive human egocentric and ethnocentric practices. Sometimes, humans behave as if
they would have gifted with our existence for their exclusive use, but in many regions we have lived
without them for millennia, and are they who need of us, and not we who need of them. Bisons and
caribous are the North American wild version of yaks and reindeer and they have kept their
migratory patterns and survived until present day. So, we don´t depend from humans, but on the
contrary.

Goal
Our priority here and now is the dissemination of our main concerns on the increasing threats on
our precious but fragile environment and our traditional way of life. Consequently, by this
declaration, we reinvindicate a higher global awaresness from the human communities, grouped in
nations and states, in organizations and their own cultural buildings, about the absence of effective
laws for animal protection. First, at global level, bringing together pet, domesticated, semi-
domesticated and wild animals. Second, at regionall level and within the limits of our homeland, by
the adoption of a specific legislation exclusive for yaks (males) nnd dris (female) and our brothers
the yak hybrids (dzos).Especially, in those environments, ecosystems and natural regions where
agriculture is very limited due to the harsh climatic and soil conditions, both wild and domestic
animals have played a crucial role to maintain permantent human civilizations, and this is specially
true in the Arctic, Inner Asia, High Asia, the Andean region, Patagonia, and the arid and semi-arid
zones of Asia and Africa.
In four of these regions: Andes, Arctic, Sahara and Middle East, and High Asia, camelids, reindeer,
camel/dromedaries, and yak respectively supported and indeed created very unique eco-cultural
aggregates which have endured for more than 10,000 years until present day without remarkable
variations. It demonstrates more than its stagnation but its validity and efficiency.
Perhaps it is time to listen what we have to say, and although we cannot speak could be possible to
interpret how we can feel if humans ask ourselves on the manner we are treated
 “WE, THE YAKS” DECLARATION

 We, the yaks, are proud of being yaks and belonging to a big family of at least 15 millions of
us distributed over a huge territory encompassing high mountains and plateaus of the heart
of Asia, territory that constitute an indivisble unit, although it has been politically divided,
but that cannot be it geographically, culturally or spiritually. We, the yaks are an inherent
product but also a connatural part of this unit, which is called by humans as High Asia.
 Since inmemorial times we have lived in the High Asia region, long before humans came to
settle down in our common homeland. In that time all of us we were wild and free. But
when humans managed to adapt to our harsh and challenging environment they found in us
an indispensable source of resources to survive there, as we provide food in form of meat,
viscera and milk, raw material to keep humans warm with our wool and skin that they have
used to make coats and tents, with our dungs processed for combustible to heat the tents and
for cooking, with our capacity to carrry goods in the hilly areas and also in the plains, to
move human nomadic encampments from place to place or to develop barter trading
systems based in long-distance caravans that made possible the obtention of additional
products for humans from other places and communities.
 Therefore, we, the yaks, are one of the most extraordinary beings you can find in the high
mountain areas of Asia where grass grows forming extensive areas of very nutritious
grasslands.
 Our homelands is incredibly beautiful and rich, in spite of its extreme weather and
remoteness. The high mountains sourrounding our grasslands produce numerous glaciers
and permanent icefields feeding the highlands but also the lowlands where a great majority
of humans live. These icefields and glaciers, together with the abundant rainfall in some
lower areas generate, at the same time, many rivers and lakes forming a huge fluvial
network and we decisively contribute to the well functioning of this inmense fluvial network
 keeping these grasslands in good condition, regenerating grass with our excrements
containing a diversity of seeds and allowing grasslands to grow vigourously with our
seasonal movements to avoid depletion. That´s why we don´t understand why some humans
consider us like low-productive animals and they are usually wishing to increase our
productivity in detriment of the quality of our products as well as jeopardising the patiently
forged previous balance, but also creating stress in our lives.
 When humans came to our homeland they started hunting us but later they understood that
we were more beneficial for them if they kept us alive and closer to get a continued access
to the many services we can provide them. Accordingly, we formed an alliance based in
mutual respect and convivence. In this alliance, we abandoned our wild beahaviour whereas
they adopted our nomadic routines.
 Our relationship with humans began as long as 10,000 years ago and these early human
colonizers developed rural communities with specific characteristics for adapting to our
homeland, and they learnt to love it and respect it. That is the reason by which our
grasslands didn´t suffer a drastic transformation until very recent times and this tacit
agreement has configurated the yak world during the last 10,000 years.
 So, at the beginning we formed a natural human-animal coalition without any fracture apart
of the distance and the regional divergences impossed by the environmental variability.
 These human communities, our companions, know well that we have lived during very long
time as wild animals and that we couldn´t be completely domesticated as other animals more
adapted to the farming system. So, most of us now are clearly semi-domesticated animals
and we cannot change our nature. Farm is not our natural environment and we suffer very
much is that kind of artificial enclosures.
 But also, humans have to realize and accept that because of our semi-domesticated status we
are more productives and we can defend ourselves bettter from our natural predators:
wolves, bears and snow leopards. So, we don´t need a permanent surveillance by our human
companions and we can stay in our grasslands letting humans to get involved in other
activities which probably they need to complement their family economies, as our homeland
is so extraordinryly beauty as demanding. Therefore, our productivity increase with our
autonomy in form of time gained for humans to make compatible yak husbandry with other
activities.
 To tell the truth the proximity of humans always produce on us a certain grade of stress, as
we cannot forget our wild past. That is the case in situations of close proximity when our
females are milked and they are separated of their babies, or when we are shorn or marked.
 However and although we understand the great need for humans of our products they must
understand that we are only happy if we are free during a long period of time, without
humans in the middle, to enjoy with our famlies, the babies and the elders, running, resting
and feeding freely, or fighting perhaps on the grasslands and mountains, as this is our nature.
So, we are not pigs or hens which can easily adapt to the small farm scheme. We are yaks
needed of the connatural elements which made us what we are.
 As our homeland encompasses high mountain areas from the northern Sayan and Altai
mountains to the southern slopes of the Himalayas, from the eastern Hengduan mountains to
the western Pamirs and Tian Shan, the early human communities who dared to live with us
acquired very similar ways of living and even very similar facial aspects and a common
sense of respect towards a similar landscape derived from their high dependence of nature
but also of the proper understnading of the enormous importance of any factor altering the
natural conditions in this delicate environmental mechanism.
 Fortunately, these first human colonizers could manage its survival in the way of not casuing
a negative impact on this mechanism such as to alter its deep functioning, vital to keep both
its crucial economic and spritual-cultural relevance.
 Thus, most of us, we were included in a sort of unfragmented human-animal coalition
inserted in a very specific and unique ecosystem which has been called High Asia.
 Forged as a biogeographical and a biocultural unity, the High Asia region is composed by a
sucession of magnificent high-mountain ranges linked one to each other, although the
obsession of humans for classifying all could suggest that they are somehow separated.
They, the humans, called to the main moutains areas and great central high plateau with
these names: Sayan, Altai, Tian Shan, Qilian, Kunlun, Tibet, Pamir, Hindu-Kush,
Karakoram, Himalaya, but we realize that they are, in turn, composed by other many
mountain chains, so the most important for us is humans to know that our homeland is
constituted by the altitudinal belt found between from 2,000 m up to 5,000 m of altitude,
depending from latitude and orientation and other minor factors.
 They also denominated themselves with a diversity of names: Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Khalkha,
Uriankhai, Yuku, Khampa, Amdowa, Golog, Ü-Tangpa, Monpa, Laya, Changpa, Ngaripa,
Sherpa, Langtangpa, Lhopa, Dolpa, Balti, Hunza, Wakhi, etc., but we have mostly known
them under the generic title of “Drokpa”, the people from the highlands. So, in order to
adapt us, these peoples became nomads, like us, following the natural seasonal and strategic
punctual movements which have made possible our lives to get the best pastures, stimulating
at the same time the regeneration of the grasses once consumed by us.
 As we are not a anti-social and racist group, in addition to mix with humans and by their
mediation we also mixed with other similar animals from the adjacent lower altitude areas to
produce hybrids which were able to live in less cold habitats between 2,000 m and 3,000 m.
high, and we transferred them with some of our unique characteristics, such as the good
quality of our milk.
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR OUR HUMAN NEIGHBOURING COMMUNITIES

 We deserve great respect from humans as we have provided a diversity of very high valued
services for them during millenia.
 As any other alive being, we suffer of stress in the new socio-environmental scenario and in
these conditions of over-pressure we are not able to produce qood quality products, as
humans cannot give the best of them if they feel stressed too.
 We understand the more and more human communites want to enjoy of our services in form
of high-quality meat, milk and derived dairy products, the exceptional and diverse quality of
our yak wool, from the yak down to the yak coarse wool, the latter transformed in a true
symbol of the human-yak coalition for centuries with the massive adoption of the black tent.
We know that more and more human communities enjoy visiting our homeland and they
wish to enjoy the rare privilege of living here, in our homeland, permanently, but this should
´t be at the price of transforming our homeland to make a copy of the intensive urban model
imported from the lowlands. Otherwise those what is more appreciated for humans won´t
exist any more for new generations of humans, your sons and daughter.
 Therefore, this understandable wish of increasing production and yak-derived products
consumption in no way implies having a drastic change in our traidional style of life, that
which made of us famous for our competitivity all around the world, competitivity including
the environmental services and the great scenery of some of the most astonishing high
mountain and high plateaus in all over the world.
 We don´t like to see our ancestral homeland full of fences which add stress to our lives,
restrict our natural movements and decrease the quality of our products, at the same
affecting the productivity of our grasslands from which we depend on.
 We also don´t like to feel permanently observed by video as if you were some kind of
property as we are just the property of nature. Fences and video should be confined to the
farming system context from the lowlands where intensivity and masive production,
overpopulation and air pollution are the common place, but not in the pristine territory
 conforming our homeland.
 So, we recommend to the yak owners, public institutions and the owner of the private
enterprise to find solutions to manage grasslands in common for mutual benefit.
 We also recommend to make border more transparent or at least habilitate trans-boundary
programmes which allow all our extended family can exchange our germplasm to enrich all
the yak community and produce stronger descendants.
 The artificial insemination as well as the on-distance germplasm commerce not only is
expensive and anti-natural but it also produces an addtional stress in some of us. Perhaps
you could understand better if it is forcily applied on the human themselves. Because,
although we are animals we also have heart and spirit, and we also suffer when faced with
situations out of our natural behaviour.
 We deserve better treatment, as the treatment is now given to other domestic animals,
companion animals, as dogs and cats, which are very well treated in spite of they are
providing substantial products to humans beyond company. We, the yaks, not only provide
company to our indigenous human communities but much more than this and however we
are now being treated in a more unfair manner.
 We call private and private institutions, international agencies, specialized entrerpises, and
indigenous communities for an general improvement in our lives and a better undesrtanding
of our ways of life and our limitation in production and the further implication of our role on
the global envionmental management in a very crucial region as that of High Asia.
 We trust that, alghough we cannot speak our human neighbours can understand that we are
not a mere commodity to be explited at the last consequences. We have been a vital source
of richness for humans since long time ago but also a spiritual symbol as well as a key piece
in a complex, very sophisticated and very delicate ecosytem mechanism, and so, we want to
continue being it.
 We were very sad hearing from our ancestors about the border closing and different
compartmentalisation of our homelands in separated countries, provinces and areas
subjedted to a diversity rules of access restriction and segretation. We thougth that humans
were an intelligent race but we don´t understand how an intelligent species can split natural
regions in artificial parts.
 For this reason and all the other ones explained in this declaration we are willing come back
to the previous situation when our common homelands was a eco-cultural space in which we
and our companions reached a consesual and prolonged pact. But if this is not possible in
 spite of the intelligence of the human race then we wish to find any other formula to make
possible the union of all the yaks and the yak-herding communities towards a common
project to restaure our dignity as the disctintive animal and cultural mark in the High Asia
region.
 An association of the human communities who are accompanied us during the last 10,000
years, our traditional herding communities, is not only necessary but imperative for our
future, as now we have seen more and more people coming to our homeland, sometimes
without the enough and proper undesrtanding of our culture and ways of living, which is
only provided by centuries of mutual interaction. Additionally, this our homeland has
already been a almost empty land and this is key to keep its high productivity, mainly in
terms of fresh water production and other ecological services. With more and more people
populating our ancestral land we feel more and more nervous, as most of them don´t
understand us and also don´t share our unique way of life based in mobility, extensive
occupation and low-impact exploitation of the surrounding resources. This apparently low-
production model at local scale is what makes of the High Asia region a very productive
area at global scale.
 As we cannot speak, but only grunt, and also we have not the technology able to make our
rights visible, we urgently need of our loyal companions, the yak-herding communities, to
defend our unique, positive and win-win biopastoral system, specially when many experts,
business people and lowlanders are coming into our homeland attracted by our products but
perhaps not too much interested in our traditions and how to improve our lives according to
our own criteria and need, those making us happier and more competitive at long-term.
 We also wish that all the yak-herding communities associated both in legal or informal
institutions can support us by suscribing this our declaration as the lawful inhabitants of the
Asian highlands and convince others influencial people living in the yak orbit to operate in
the correct manner.
 We expect that by suscribing or endorsing this declaration and therefore accepting our old
principles and our character and customary laws, as well as recognising the High Asia as our
common homeland, now needed of being integrally protected beyond of any political,
eocnomic or any other partisan interest, can be establshed in fact a global association of all
the yak herders irrespective of their religion, nationality or economic status.
 ABOUT the AUTHOR and the PROJECT

Santiago J. Carralero has devoted long periods of the last

ten years to research on the yak-herding communities in the
High Asia region and to apply this research to do something
useful and beneficial for that communities.
Between 2008 and 2014, he was travelling through East
Tibet, in many different areas of Kham and Amdo regions
belonging to the Chinese province of Qinghai, Sichuan and
Yunnan, where the World´s largest yak flocks are found.
Later he focused his research in the Yushu area of Qinghai
province and in the economic and cultural change produced
between the pre-earthquake and the post-earthquake Yushu,
and this was the subject of his Master thesis on Applied
Anthropology.
This time was crucial to understand the complexity of the
ecological, economic, cultural and political circumstances
affecting pastoralists and its tight intertwining in the High
Asia region, and this understanding was fundamental to
undertake more ambitous projects to correct the detected
imbalances.
The opportunity came with the intention of FAO´s
Pastoralism Knowledge Hub to do something in favour of
the yak-herding communities at global level. Thus, in
2015, Mr Carralero´s proposed to create a World Yak
Herders Association and FAO decided to fund its first
phase, an eminently anthroplogical exercise consisting of
one year and half fieldwork duration on the High Asia
region called “Community Dialogue in High Asia”. The
project, initiated in 2016, has had a continuity until August
2018, with the VI Edition of the International Conference
on Yak, the first to include an international representation
of yak herders and yak-herding representives thanks, again,
to an additional FAO funding support togehter with the
ICIMOD commitment to include the YURTA-FAO yak-
herding cooperation programme in its own working agenda.
In this International Conference on Yak, a World Yak
Federation was proposed for integrating yak-related
research, industry and pastoral sectors and the next edition
of the Conference, to be held in Lhasa, 2021, could be the
oppotunity to consolidate a World Yak Herders Association.