A Rancher Cloned a Giant Sheep. The Feds Jailed Him for Allegedly Risking Ecological Disaster.
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.
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.
There is no denying that Schubarth violated various laws when he set out to clone argali sheep. According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s sentencing memo, Schubarth conspired with others to illegally import, clone, buy, breed, and sell argali sheep in violation of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the Endangered Species Act (ESA), and Montana’s ban on such sheep. He also falsified records related to the transport of prohibited species in violation of the Lacey Act.
Wild argali sheep, as noted in their CITES listing, are not presently threatened with extinction. A recent report finds that the wild argali population in Kyrgyzstan has increased since 2014 from about 15,000 to more than 21,000 (the total world population is around 75,000). Nevertheless, the FWS set aside the more lenient CITES designation in 2002 and listed argali sheep as “threatened” under the ESA, meaning that argali
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