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81-Year-Old Montana Man Sentenced After Cloning Giant Sheep for Trophy Hunting
A Montana livestock ranch isn't where you'd expect to find cutting edge and highly illegal cloning operations.
In Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg’s 1993 science fiction action adventure Jurassic Park, John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) wields the tools of science to craft living hybrid dinosaurs for profit. The resulting animals are objectively an incredible scientific achievement, but the dinosaurs aren’t supposed to be there, in that time and place. As Dr. Ian Malcom (Jeff Goldblum) famously says, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.”
Three decades later, and in real-world Montana, 81-year-old Arthur “Jack” Schubarth has just been sentenced for similar, albeit less spectacular, genetic crimes after successfully cloning a large Asian sheep at his Montana ranch. Schubarth’s crimes ran afoul of international treaties in addition to state and federal law. He was convicted of two felonies, conspiracy to violate the Lacey Act, which prohibits the movement or sale of illegally acquired wildlife, and substantively violating the Lacey Act. Schubarth will serve six months in federal prison in addition to $24,000 in combined fines paid to the Lacey Act Reward Fund and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.
Montana Man Sentenced After Cloning Giant Sheep at Livestock Ranch
The judge considered Schubarth’s age and his lack of any previous criminal record with the need to sufficiently address the crime committed and deter any future would be cloners. In addition to fines and prison time, Schubarth will undergo three years of supervised release.
The cloning conspiracy began in 2013, with a Marco Polo sheep hunted in Kyrgyzstan. The Marco Polo is the largest sheep in the world, weighing as much as 300 pounds, with horns that can reach 5-feet long from scalp to tip. Parts of that animal were imported illegally to the United States and taken to Schubarth Ranch, officially called Sun River Enterprises LLC, a 215-acre facility specializing in “alternative livestock,” including mountain sheep, mountain goats, and other ungulates.
Those animals were mostly sold to private hunting preserves in Texas, where trophy hunters pay a substantial fee for the opportunity to kill them. While conventional (legal) alternative livestock already command high prices, Schubarth and five co-conspirators worked to clone the Marco Polo in order to make a new species of larger hybrid sheep which would fetch even heftier fees.
After getting the Marco Polo tissues into the country, Schubarth collected genetic material and sent them to a lab to create cloned embryos. Clones can be created through a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer. During this process, the nucleus is removed from an egg cell and replaced with the nucleus of a cell from the animal you want to clone. Once Schubarth received the cloned embryos, he implanted them into several sheep on his ranch and waited. In the end, he got a single live individual, a perfect copy of the sheep hunted in Central Asia. He named that animal Montana Mountain King, or MMK, for short.
Once Schubarth had a live animal, he used it to artificially impregnate several other species of sheep, each of which were also prohibited in Montana, in an effort to create the ultimate mega monster sheep. He also sold MMK’s semen and allowed a local rancher to breed 74 of their sheep with MMK, with the offspring fetching as much as $10,000 apiece.
A sentencing memorandum submitted by the defense congratulated Schubarth on the scientific achievement while also scolding him for how it was done. "Jack did something no one else could, or has ever done,” the memo said, via Newsweek. “On a ranch, in a barn in Montana, he created Montana Mountain King. MMK is an extraordinary animal, born of science, and from a man who, if he could rewrite history, would have left the challenge of cloning a Marco Polo only to the imagination of Michael Crichton.”
That’s good advice.
Watch Jurassic Park and the rest of the Jurassic franchise, now available from Universal Pictures.
