Takin Facts

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The Caprines are so underrated. Not only are they smarter than we give them credit for – even in the in-bred abominations we use as livestock – they also fill wild niches in places so inhospitable they have yet to be encroached upon by humans. 

There are some obvious heroes of this tribe: the agile and powerful mountain goat or the well-adorned Himalayan argali ram are good contenders, but the Takin is such a surprising beast, that everyone thought it was a cow until genetic analysis showed it’s actually a goat with a dialed-in hypertrophy program.

Takin Facts Overview

Takins are huge. They’re up there with muskox for the heavyweight title of the Caprini tribe.

These enormous animals are mountain specialists, so it’s a good job they live at fairly high altitudes up in the Himalayan region.

They form large herds, make terrifying noises and pee on themselves if you question their authority. 

Interesting Takin Facts

1. They’re almost goats

Takins look a lot like a wildebeest bred with a muskox to make some kind of character from Greek mythology. 

They’re over two meters long, over a meter at the shoulder, and have thick, shaggy coats and a powerful build. Their heads are enormous and both sexes have horns that grow to over half a metre in length. They have short legs and powerful, two-toed hooves.  

So, it’s a bit surprising that they have been discovered to share a tribe with the well-known goats. In fact, goats and blue sheep are the Takin’s closest relatives, though compared with goats, they seem to have much simpler brains. But don’t say that to their faces. ¹

2. They’re social

Takins graze in large herds of up to 300 members in the Summer. When Winter comes along and food scarcity increases, they disperse a lot, gathering in smaller groups of around 20 or so. 

They move around slowly and deliberately, but with surprising agility, with males spending more time alone than females do, often disappearing for months at a time away from the herd. 

3. They’re high-altitude specialists

These animals are comfortable between 2000 and 3000 meters up but will extend to 4000 meters if they can find food up there. 

They’re well equipped for this world, with huge nostrils to suck in thin air, thick, oily coats that keep them very warm and dry, and an incredible goaty climbing ability, despite being so thicc. 

Actually, Takins are disconcertingly nimble, and while they’re slow animals they can cover a lot of rough ground. They’re even well balanced when standing on hind legs, and can reach branches 3 meters off the ground. ²

4. They pee on themselves to pull rank 

There’s nothing quite as dominant as peeing all over yourself, especially if you make eye contact while you do it. 

It’s the ultimate display of power, and Takins know this. Males, and perhaps females too, use this behaviour as a sign of rank, and as you’d expect, nobody wants to mess with them after that. 

The idea that they do this for ranking is still in need of more evidence, but nobody has a better one yet. 

5. They rumble

There are some animals whose call triggers some innate response, deep within your soul. The roar of an elephant or the hiss of a snake seems to signal to some kind of evolved understanding – carved into our population by millions of deaths among those who didn’t have it – that these are things to take very seriously. 

The rumble of the Takin is one of these sounds. It’s an incredible, guttural string of thuds like a rope being tightened over a barrel, except this barrel has 500kg of meat behind a pair of bony spikes up to 65cm long, cemented to a thick skull. 

This is the kind of sound our ancestors would have heard a lot during the Pleistocene, and probably not one to be taken lightly, though considering how successful those ancestors were at killing everything, it was presumably instilling a sense of caution rather than panicked fear. ³

6. They might have inspired legends

In the Classic Greek epic, the hero Jason led the Argonauts on a series of incredible adventures on the quest to find a golden fleece. After leaving the island of foul-smelling women, passing the six-armed giants in loincloths, escaping a pair of huge slamming cliffs and rescuing King Phineas from the horrible harpies, they finally stole the golden fleece from a sleeping dragon. 

On the way back there were even more weird things the poor sailors had to go through, but the point is, this golden fleece, according to some, may have come from the golden Takin, an incredible subspecies from the Qin mountains with golden brown wool. 

At least, that’s the most believable part of the story. In the legend, the fleece belonged to a golden-woolled, winged ram that was sacrificed by the very guy who was rescued by it. It’s more likely that – was there ever such a fleece in the first place – it came from the golden Takin. 

7. Overhunting is finally catching them up

Having lived at such high altitudes for so long, the Takin species has evaded damage from even the most intrepid of Greek explorers, until recently. 

Habitat destruction from deforestation is a problem in Tibet and China, but hunting is a bigger one. The same can be said for the populations in Myanmar and the current range of the Takin is now greatly reduced. 

Today, the species is listed as Vulnerable, with its numbers dropping. ⁴

Takin Fact-File Summary

Scientific Classification

1. Ming Zhou (2019), “The complete mitochondrial genome of Budorcas taxicolor tibetana (Artiodactyla: Bovidae) and comparison with other Caprinae species: Insight into the phylogeny of the genus Budorcas”, Science Direct.
2. Author Name (Year), “Article Name”, Publication.
3. Anton Shcherbinin (2023), “Golden takin rumbles”, YouTube.
4. “Takin”, IUCN Red List.