Montana Mountain King

There were some hardy and enterprising men in the American wild west .....

Arthur Jack Schubarth

.... and Mr Schubarth proves that Montana ranchers are still a breed of their own.

At least, that's what we can deduce from the trouble 80 year old Arthur "Jack" Schubarth, who lives in Vaughn, and who runs his family 215-acre alternative livestock ranch in the state, got into. Because in these difficult times, even a Montana rancher has to think outside the box for extra income.

Marco Polo Sheep

So Jack decided to import genetic material from the giant Marco Polo sheep of Krygystan, which as you can see sport a fine set of horns (They can also weigh up to 300 pounds, and their curled horns can grow to be five feet long) ..... therein lies his cunning plan. From the imported genetic material, Jack paid a bio-lab to create cloned embryo's which impregnated his normal sheep with. This eventually produced a fine, genetically pure, Marco polo ram.

He then set this tup ram to tupping (mating) his ewes (as well as artificially inseminating them), and thus soon had a flock of hybrids that had good chances of sporting similar or equally large sets of horns ..... a trait that made them very attractive to hunters looking for a fine set of trophy horns to hang on their wall, without the expense of flying to Krygystan (where hunting these wild sheep is a good tourist income raiser). He even named the hybrid breed produced as the Montana Mountain King (MMK).

But just when this plan seemed to have come to fruition ..... in stepped the US Fish and Wildlife Services. It seems that Jack forgot one or two things, the first of which was to obtain legal permits for the importation of any sperm and testicle tissue (which probably wouldn't have been granted), nor for the cloning, which also would have been blocked. He had claimed that he only used genetic material obtained from remnants of a Marco Polo ram, he had bought from a US hunter who had killed a sheep in Kyrgyzstan in 2019. 

Jack was arrested, and at trial he was found guilty of illegally cloning sheep. His last statement to the court before sentencing was 'I will have to work the rest of my life to repair everything I've done. My family has never been broke, but we are now.'

But this case is a little more complicated than simply that of a country rancher, trying a novel way to increase his income by bypassing some US laws ..... there were at least five unnamed co-conspirators involved in the scheme to impregnate various species of ewes - all of which activities were prohibited in Montana, and he and his co-conspirators had forged veterinary inspection certificates, in order to move the illegal sheep in and out of Montana. These forged documents claimed that the sheep were a legally permitted species.

However by crossing state boundaries, they also broke federal laws and sold MMK's semen and hybrid sheep to people in Texas, while a Minnesota resident had 74 sheep inseminated by MMK over a period of time. The illegal hybrid sheep were sold to people in Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota and West Virginia. The prosecution were therefore pressing for a long prison sentence, for what was a complicated scheme involving a large number of people and many illegal activities, with on-going investigations.

However the Judge said that, in sentencing he had weighed the defendant's age and lack of a previous criminal record, with giving a sentence that would deter anyone else from trying to 'change the genetic make-up of the creatures' on the earth. 

So Jack was sentenced to six months in federal prison, 3 years probation, and told that he couldn't breed game stock during his probation, as well as having to give evidence at further trials (as part of his plea deal). To add to his woes, he was also hit with a $20,000 fine and ordered to make a $4,000 payment to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Montana wildlife officials said that the case is still being investigated.

So, what started out as a simple story about a rancher trying to make money, became a major crminal incident involving the 'Feds' as well as state authorities ....