Our ox is not the only worker of his kind. In far-off Asia there are two other animals which are cousins of the ox and are made to work like him. Their names belong to the end of the alphabet, for they are called the Yak and the Zebu. The Yak is found in Tibet and other parts of Central Asia, where it is tamed and put to work, but not to pull the cart or the plough. It can carry heavy loads and travel twenty miles a day.
Hauling Sugar Cane in Puerto Rico
This animal has a thick coat of long, silky hair, which hangs nearly to the ground. Ropes and cloth are made from it. The tail is just a great bunch of long hair. The Yak does not bellow like the ox but gives a short grunt. Its milk is very rich, and fine butter is made from it.
The White Yak of the Asiatic Mountains
The Zebu is kept in India, China, East Africa and the islands of the eastern seas. It is much like the ox but has a big hump of fat on its shoulders. Sometimes there are two humps. In this way it is like the camel. Some of the zebus are larger than any oxen and some are only as big as a large mastiff dog. They are quiet, gentle animals, made to work in the plough and in the road and also used for riding. They can travel from twenty to thirty miles a day.
There is another animal much used for the same kind of work, the Buffalo. This is not the animal long known in our country as the buffalo, but which is really not a buffalo, its proper name being bison. It is not a savage animal and could easily have been tamed and put to work. But as the settlers in the colonies had the ox and the horse already trained to their work no one tried to tame the bison. Since no one cared for these great animals, the hunters got after them and shot them in such vast numbers that now they are nearly all gone. Where fifty years ago there were millions of them in the West, to-day there are only a few hundreds to be found anywhere.
