Frankenstein's Sheep

Cloned and genetically modified animals are jumping the lab and entering the black market, possibly forever altering our ecosystems.

- Alice Hines

Montana Mountain King was born in 2017. He was taken into custody from Jack Schubarth's ranch four years later.

THE WAY THE FEDERAL AGENTS swarmed Jack Schubarth's ranch in Montana on a late-spring day in 2021, it seemed they could have been taking down an anti-government militia.

It was a dry morning when Schubarth, an 82-year-old whose family owns a small-town pet store, first heard the helicopter buzzing overhead. Then came around 60 federal agents and state officers, racing out of a fleet of black vans. They searched the property, found 15 guns, and piled them on Schubarth's bed. But the guns weren't what they came for: The agents were searching for his sheep.

Specifically, they were there for a Marco Polo argali he called the “Montana Mountain King,” or MMK for short. At the time of the raid, MMK was on his way to becoming the biggest horned ram in America. His muscular legs were capable of carrying him at speeds over 30 mph in mountain terrain; his spiraling horns were predicted to grow to the length of a piano. The agents eventually found MMK in a sprawling pasture, where they fired tranquilizer darts at him until he passed out, falling onto a fence. The Feds loaded him into a trailer. They wouldn't tell Schubarth where they were taking him. He was stunned.

Argali are native to Central Asia and are favorites of elite big-game hunters: Donald Trump Jr. nabbed one in Mongolia in 2019. But MMK had never been to Asia. He was a clone—made by Schubarth himself, right there on the ranch, the only animal of his kind in America. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the sheep had no business being in the state or the country at all.

2013: The son of a Montana rancher harvests cells from a Marco Polo argali ram in Kyrgyzstan.