Montana Man Gets Prison Time For Cloning And Hybridizing Bighorn Sheep

HELENA, Mont. — An 81-year-old Montana man was sentenced Monday to six months in federal prison for illegally using tissue and testicles from large sheep hunted in Central Asia and the U.S. to create hybrid sheep for captive trophy hunting in Texas and Minnesota.

U.S. District Court Judge Brian Morris said he struggled to come up with a sentence for Arthur “Jack” Schubarth of Vaughn, Montana. He said he weighed Schubarth's age and lack of a criminal record with a sentence that would deter anyone else from trying to “change the genetic makeup of the creatures” on the earth.

Morris also fined Schubarth $20,000 and ordered him to make a $4,000 payment to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Schubarth will be allowed to self-report to a Bureau of Prisons medical facility.

Schubarth pleaded guilty in March to charges that he and five other people conspired to use tissue from a Marco Polo sheep illegally brought into the U.S. to clone that animal and then use the clone and its descendants to create a larger, hybrid species of sheep that would be more valuable for captive hunting operations.

Marco Polo sheep are the largest in the world, can weigh 300 pounds (136 kilograms) and have curled horns up to 5 feet (1.5 meters) long, court records said.

Schubarth sold semen from MMK along with hybrid sheep to three people in Texas, while a Minnesota resident brought 74 sheep to Schubarth’s ranch for them to be inseminated at various times during the conspiracy, court records said. Schubarth sold one direct offspring from MMK for $10,000 and other sheep with lesser MMK genetics for smaller amounts.

This is just a crazy whirlwind of bioethics, way too advanced technology, and wildlife conservation that blows my mind. This dude tried to create an even bigger sheep to shoot on game preserves and was willing to travel to the ends of the earth to do it.

I don't even know the science involved in taking testicular tissue from a sheep and using it to breed with another species of sheep is wild. Like how diabolical of an idea to just go from "Yeah I breed sheep for people to kill on private ranches" to "I am cloning the largest sheep on earth to cross-breed it with legal American sheep so trophy hunters can kill BIGGER AND BADDER SHEEP". This is a step away from the movie predator trying to hunt humans because they are the most dangerous game. Imagine if this guy cross-bred humans with sheep to create an even crazier prey animal for rich people to hunt. 

Yeah, you wanna get crazy let's create Ram Humans to hunt. We never thought a case like this would exist, who knows if that's what's next.