🐄 Dairy animals

Dairy animals are species that people regularly milk. The FAO names cattle, buffalo, goats, sheep and camels as the main ones, and counts yaks, horses, donkeys and reindeer among the less common. Other animals are milked in small numbers too: mithun, zebu and their hybrids, and moose on a handful of farms.

Each dairy animal occupies its own ecological niche. According to the FAO, sheep are common in the semi-arid Mediterranean, goats on Africa’s poor soils, horses on the steppes of Central Asia, camels in drylands, buffalo in the humid tropics, and yaks in highlands such as the Tibetan Plateau. In developing countries about a third of the milk comes from buffalo, goats, camels and sheep, while in developed countries almost all milk is from cows.

Almost all dairy animals are ruminants or close to them (camelids have a three-chambered stomach that works in a similar way). They can turn grass and roughage that people cannot eat into milk. The exception is equids, which have a single-chambered stomach; that is why the fat in mare’s and donkey milk differs markedly from cow’s milk fat.