Claim: The animal in the photograph is a Himalayan Yak captured on camera in Khaplu Valley, Gilgit-Baltistan.
Fact: The photo shows a bison, not a yak, and was taken by Tom Murphy in Yellowstone National Park in the United States.
On 1 January 2022, a tweet was sent to Soch Fact Check for verification. In it, Twitter user @AzharMKhan3 shared a photo of a snow-covered bovine and captioned it as follows:
“A beautiful Himalayan Yak captured in Khaplu Valley, after it had spent a night in heavy snow and chilled weather ranging till minus 18.”
The blue-toned image attached in the tweet appeared to be a screenshot of an original picture. The post received close to 50 responses and was retweeted more than 300 times. On various other social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, the image was shared with an Urdu caption, which reads as follows:
“خپلو (گلگت بلتستان) کی منفی 18 ڈگری کی یخ بستہ رات کے بعد صبح سویرے ہمالیائی یاک کا ایک منظر
[Khaplu (Gilgit-Baltistan) A view of the Himalayan yak early in the morning after a freezing night of minus 18 degrees.]”
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check determined the image to be misleading.
The image was originally shot by Tom Murphy, an internationally recognized photographer who has taken part in extensive travels across the 3400-square-mile Yellowstone National Park and whose “passion and specialty is Yellowstone National Park”, according to his website, which also lists prices for prints of the picture named ‘Bison Coated with Frost’.
Bison are generally found in the Americas and Europe, not in South Asia. One family of the animal does have roots in India and China, although that species is now extinct.
Virality
Soch Fact Check looked up the following two search phrases on CrowdTangle:
- “Himalayan Yak Khaplu Valley”
- “خپلو (گلگت بلتستان) کی منفی 18 ڈگری کی یخ بستہ رات کے بعد صبح سویرے ہمالیائی یاک کا ایک منظر”
According to a CrowdTangle analysis, the English search term yielded 14 posts on Facebook that garnered more than 3,000 interactions over the past 12 months, while the one in Urdu bagged close to 1,500 interactions.
Over the past 10 years, to date, the English search term received over 7,500 interactions across 39 Facebook posts, while the one in Urdu reached more than 2,500 interactions.
Soch Fact Check observed that the number of interactions peaked twice over the past decade — once in January 2019 and then in December 2021. The oldest Facebook post with the claim appears to have been posted at 11:16pm on 23 January 2019. The post that has the most interactions and shares is this one while the one with the most comments is this one.
Khan — the Twitter user who originally posted the image at 8:48 PM — acknowledged in a later tweet that he had shared a misleading image and had been corrected.
Conclusion: The animal in the photograph is a bison not a yak. The photograph was shot by Tom Murphy in Yellowstone National Park in the US, not in Khaplu, Gilgit-Baltistan.