CANADA’S DOOMED YAK STRATEGY
How a plan to import the beasts went awry
It would be rather unfair, after everything that went down, to blame it all on Matilda. She arrived so late in the game, after all. And it wasn’t her fault that she was barren.
But of all the odd twists in this ill-fated saga, Matilda’s is perhaps the easiest to understand. So it makes sense to start with her. If nothing else, she makes a decent scapegoat—or scapeyak if you prefer.
Matilda was one of three domestic yaks purchased by the Canadian government in the later stages of a wild, doomed scheme to import Indian yaks into Canada’s far north.
The plan, as detailed in a new academic paper by University of Montreal historian David Meren, published in the journal Histoire Sociale/ Social History, was to introduce the yaks to the Inuit people of Ungava Bay, in northern Quebec, in a latecolonial effort to wean them from their traditional ways of life.
As an added twist, Canada hoped to use the plot to cultivate a special relationship with a newly-independent India. Jean Lesage, then the minister of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources, went so far as to ask Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent to raise the issue at a bilateral meeting with his Indian counterpart, Jawaharlal Nehru.
“There might be some appeal to Mr. Nehru and to the people of India in the idea that it would be possible for them to reciprocate in some measure the assistance that Canada has been providing,” Lesage wrote in a letter to St. Laurent.
In the end, St. Laurent never got the chance, Meren, who uncovered a host of historical letters and internal government records in his research, writes. Instead, it was left to the diplomatic core.
Meren believes the yak scheme originated in 1953 with an animal husbandry expert at Ottawa’s Experimental Farm named Grant Carman. Carman was working off an idea pitched by, among others, a McGill University PhD student named Marjorie Findlay, to introduce sheep farming to far northern populations then coping with the radical decline of caribou herds.
Carman, however, thought yaks would be a more appropriate fit for that landscape, according to Meren.
Carman wasn’t the first to believe Himalayan yaks could thrive in Canada. According to Diane Latona, an historian with the International Yak Association (IYAK), Canadians had been breeding yaks by that point, with mostly poor results, for almost 50 years.
In her history of the North American yak, Latona cites a letter, dated 1907, from Earl Grey, Canada’s governor general at the time, to the secretary of state for the British Colonies that touches on a plan to import Tibetan yaks to Canada. The next year, the Canadian Archives show a record for a “shipment of yaks” dated Nov. 10, Latona wrote.
Canada’s yak capital in the first half of the 20th century was Wainwright, Alta. For several decades, scientists at a facility there tried interbreeding yaks with bison and cows, with little success. The yaks/bison/cow hybrids that did survive failed to thrive, Latona, who operates her own yak farm in Washington State, said. The males were uniformly sterile. The older yaks also failed to adapt to the Alberta winters, requiring additional shelter and food to stay warm.
Despite those failings, the federal government embarked, several decades later, on a new plan to send yaks to northern Quebec.
The yak caper, though, never came to fruition. For one thing, the Department of Agriculture, citing fears of “foot and mouth and other contagious diseases,” vetoed the idea of bringing in a herd from India in 1954.
Remarkably, that didn’t kill the scheme entirely. In 1956, the government acquired three yaks, including Matilda, from the Catskill Game Farm in New York state. The hope was to breed them into a mighty herd at Ottawa’s Experimental Farm.
That, too, proved impossible. For one thing, Matilda was infertile. Even after a replacement was acquired, the pace of breeding proved far too slow. It would have taken decades, Meren writes, for the yak threesome to turn into a herd.
Instead, in 1960, the six yaks in the new family, two males and four females, were shipped off to Al Oeming’s Game Farm outside Edmonton. There they helped grow what became a herd of more than 40 yaks on the farm, according to Oeming’s son, Todd.
As for the Ungava plan, Latona is skeptical it could have ever worked. Yaks do tolerate extreme cold, she said, but they require a huge amount of calories to do so. Getting that amount of hay up to what was then called Fort Chimo (the community is now known as Kuujjuaq) could have proven financially ruinous to the plan.