388 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 195 7 



CAN THE MUSK OX BE DOMESTICATED? 



Hope for domestication of musk oxen was high in the early stages 

 of the study at the Alaska Experiment Station. It was first believed 

 musk oxen were less difficult to drive and corral than reindeer. As 

 the animals aged they became untractable and hard to handle. They 

 broke down strong fences. They were belligerent. Familiarity with 

 humans had made the musk oxen fearless of their captors. Even 

 though they were given excellent care and attention, they nevertheless 

 were susceptible to diseases and infections, such as meningitis, acti- 

 nomycosis, lip-and-leg ulceration, stillbirth, and pnemnonia. Black 

 bears were destructive to them. Mosquitoes bit the eyes of the musk 

 oxen. Some animals were so badly bitten by mosquitoes that they were 

 temporarily blinded and in running through the brush seriously dam- 

 aged their eyeballs. 



Alaskan experiments were made on the possible commercial use of 

 the musk ox. Valuable wool constitutes about 60 to 80 percent of the 

 hair, the remaining 40 to 20 percent is coarse guard hairs. The wool 

 is one of the finest known, comparing favorably with that of cashmere 

 or even vicuna. The difficulty would be to obtain pure wool in 

 quantities. Clipping the animal may result in its death. Moreover, 

 clipping produces a mixture of wool and guard hairs, and no process, 

 mechanical or manual, is known by which the wool can be separated 

 economically from this mixture. The musk ox sheds its wool be- 

 ginning about the middle of May and up to the middle of June. It 

 can, at that time, be combed from the oxen, which, again, endangers 

 their lives either through shock or pneumonia. Wool can be collected 

 from objects on which it has attached itself as the animal passed, but 

 this would be too slow and tedious a way to get quantities of wool for 

 commercial use. Nevertheless, close to 100 pounds were thus gotten at 

 the Experiment Station, and much of it used in experimental textile 

 work at the University of Alaska in making scarves, stockings, and 

 mittens. The flesh of the musk ox is edible, but most people would 

 prefer beef, mutton, or pork. Moreover, the quantity of better meat 

 cuts from musk oxen is meager, because of their heavy necks and 

 foreparts, which produces a relatively small meat salvage in butcher- 

 ing. The milk of the cow musk ox is as good as cow's milk accord- 

 ing to some who had nothing but "tinned" cow's milk for compari- 

 son. But the cow musk ox produces no milk until it is 5 years old, 

 and then the quantities are small. 



CONCLUSIONS ABOUT THE COMMERCIAL USE OF MUSK OXEN 



The experiments conducted by the United States Fish and Wildlife 

 Service near Fairbanks, Alaska, clearly indicated that it is entirely 

 impracticable to raise musk oxen as a farming or commercial enter- 



