Rancher Jailed for Cloning Giant Sheep

MONTANA RANCHER ARTHUR “Jack”Schubarth, 81, succeeded in cloning a wild Marco Polo argali sheep, the world’s largest ovine species. That achievement cost him six months in jail.

- Ronald Bailey

The U.S. Department of Justice’s sentencing memo asserts that the “Court can take a step towards averting the next ecological disaster and protect the public from wide-ranging negative consequences.”

Did cloning a wild sheep really portend an ecological disaster or other wide-ranging negative consequences? Not at all.

Schubarth fell afoul of federal and state regulations that purport to protect rare wildlife from excessive exploitation. His son legally hunted argali sheep in 2013 in Kyrgyzstan, which issues a limited number of hunting permits annually. But his son neglected to fill out a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) wildlife import form that, among other things, forbids commercial use of lawfully hunted specimens.

Tissue from the trophy ram was sent to a cloning facility that turned it into 165 argali embryos. Implanted into domestic ewes, only one came to full term, on May 15, 2017. Schubarth dubbed the cloned ram “Montana Mountain King” (MMK). (The world’s first cloned mammal was a sheep named Dolly back in 1996.)

Schubarth sold semen from MMK and bred him to other sheep with the goal of creating hybrids even bigger than wild argali. These big hybrid sheep could then be hunted on wild game ranches in the United States. Such domestic hunts could arguably reduce pressure on wild argali populations. Instead of celebrating his cloning breakthrough, however, the government is punishing Schubarth.