In September A A Montana man has been sentenced to six months in prison after trading a clone of one of the world’s largest sheep species. Court documents show that Arthur Schubarth smuggled body parts of the near-endangered Marco Polo argali sheep into the United States from Kyrgyzstan and in 2015 signed a contract with a lab to create a cloned sheep that he later named Montana Mountain King (MMK). Later, according to the documents, Schubarth used MMK’s semen to inseminate sheep and then sold the offspring – each with Marco Polo’s argali genetics – to huge game hunters.
This is a strange case. This is likely only the second time an American has been prosecuted for a wildlife crime involving animal cloning. (In 2011, a man was fined $1.5 million and ordered to surrender a smuggled deer, as well as nearly $1 million worth of deer semen – which investigators say he intended to exploit to clone a whitetail deer – in a case involving illegal purchase and transportation deer.)
There is another strange element to Schubarth’s story: potentially several dozen of MMK’s descendants may now be at vast in the US. These sheep containing MMK genetics are defined as contraband in several settlement agreements signed by men who allegedly purchased the sheep from Schubarth or transported the sheep to his Montana ranch for insemination. It is unclear how many sheep are at vast and what exactly happened to them.
However, legal documents provide some guidance. One of the legal findings in the case against Schubarth is that in November 2018, one person transported 26 sheep to Schubarth’s ranch in Montana for insemination with MMK semen, and a year later the same person later transported another 48 sheep. The same document stated that in July 2020, two other people transported another 43 sheep to Schubarth’s ranch. These are at least several dozen sheep that could have had MMK offspring, and each of them could have had several lambs.
The same document also alleges that one of MMK’s offspring was transported from Minnesota to Schubarth’s ranch in Montana in May 2019. Then in July 2020, Schubarth agreed to sell 11 of MMK’s grandchildren for a total of $13,200 and one of the children MMK, a sheep named Montana Black Magic for $10,000. It is also alleged that Schubarth sold another Marco Polo hybrid sheep to a man living in South Dakota.
At least one sheep is on top: MMK himself. The sheep were initially taken to a facility accredited by the Zoological Association of America in Oregon, says Christina Meister of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) Office of Public Affairs. On October 2, MMK was flown across the country to the Rosamond Gifford Zoo in Syracuse, Up-to-date York, where he will be housed for an extended period of time. MMK is expected to be on display at the zoo in mid-November, Meister says. (USFWS declined to answer other questions from WIRED.)