- U.S. officials say an 80-year-old rancher was part of a 10-year conspiracy to breed giant sheep for hunting.
- Officials say Arthur Schubart cloned the rare Central Asian Argali sheep and sold the crossbred offspring.
- These giant sheep fetched high prices on the game market, selling for up to $10,000 each.
The Justice Department says a Montana rancher who pleaded guilty to two wildlife-related felonies tried to illegally breed a “giant hybrid sheep” breed to earn higher profits in the hunting market. did.
Arthur “Jack” Schubarth, 80, attempted to create descendants of the Marco Polo Argali sheep, a Central Asian sheep prized among hunters, the Justice Department said in a statement Tuesday. did.
Prosecutors say he was the central figure in a decade-long conspiracy involving sheep cloning, breeding and illegally importing testicles and other animal parts.
According to court documents reviewed by Business Insider, Schubart attempted to create giant sheep hybrids by breeding Argali with other sheep breeds, including Rocky Mountain bighorns.
The argali is highly prized as it is the largest extant wild sheep species on the planet and is considered a near-threatened species by the United States. Because of its size and long horns, it is hunted for sport.
These large argali-based hybrids would have fetched high prices for Schubart on the game reserve market, prosecutors said.
Approximately 14.4 million people hunt in the United States, spending a total of $45.2 billion on hunting activities, according to a five-year report released by the Fish and Wildlife Service in 2022.
Prosecutors said Schubart bred the derivatives from a male Argali sheep he kept on his ranch and was nicknamed “Montana's King of the Mountains.”
He acquired the title “Montana Mountain King” in 2013, when he teamed up with another Montana resident (anonymous) to bring in biological tissue from argali hunted in Kyrgyzstan.
Schubart then spent $4,200 to create cloned embryos from the tissue, and a male argali was born in 2017, prosecutors said.
According to court documents, the rancher took the “Montana Mountain King” to his Montana property knowingly in violation of the state's animal trafficking laws.
He then extracted semen from the “Montana Mountain King” and used it to inseminate dozens of different breeds of ewes, prosecutors said.
According to court documents, Mr. Schubart sold the male sheep crossbred offspring for two years at a high price of $10,000 each. Prosecutors said Schubart referred to the purer specimens as “Montana Black Magic.”
In 2019, he purchased the testicles of a Rocky Mountain bighorn for $400 in order to extract the semen and breed the bighorns, which were crossed with the offspring of a “Montana Mountain King,” according to court documents.
Prosecutors said Schubart also obtained false documents to hide the fact that the sheep crossbreeding was illegal.
He was convicted of one count of violating the Lacey Act and one count of conspiracy to violate the Wildlife Trafficking Act.
“This was an audacious scheme to create large numbers of hybrid sheep breeds to be sold and hunted as trophies,” Ron Howell, executive director of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, said in a Justice Department statement.
Mr. Schubart's attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent by BI outside regular business hours.
