Sable breeding in Yakutia

The presented report describes the history and current state of sable breeding in Yakutia, and an attempt is made to characterize prospects for the development of sable breeding in light of ecological and physiological features of sables’ activities of daily living under the harsh conditions of northeast Asia. On the basis of archival data, the first attempt to develop this type of fur farming in the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic is described here. In 1958–1960, in the Laboratory of Caged Fur Farming at the Yakut Scientific Research Institute of Agriculture, work was carried out on the topic “Creation and accumulation of a production herd of the best-colored sables from the Barguzin Range via cage breeding.” In the modern period, specialists began to develop sable breeding in Yakutia in the early 2000s when the demand for long-haired fur of foxes and arctic foxes fur began to fall. From 2000 to 2020, several batches of farm sables were brought to fur farms of the republic. The introduced animals on Pokrovskaya fur farm did not differ significantly in fertility from natural populations of this species in Yakutia.