An 81-year-old man from Vaughn, Montana, was sentenced to six months in prison Monday for Lacey Act violations stemming from almost a decade of illegal sheep importing, cloning, and breeding on his 215-acre exotic game ranch. Arthur “Jack” Schubarth illegally acquired parts from Marco Polo argali sheep in Kyrgyzstan and imported them into the U.S., where he and others cloned and bred giant sheep hybrids that were then sold to captive hunting operations, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
On March 12, Schubarth pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court of Montana to one count of violating the Lacey Act and one count of conspiring to violate the Lacey Act. Court documents show that between 2013 and 2021, Schubarth conspired with at least five other individuals to illegally import Marco Polo argali sheep parts and send them to a lab to create cloned embryos. (He also illegally obtained genetic material from wild bighorn sheep that were hunted in Montana.) Shchubarth then implanted the cloned embryos into the ewes on his property, Schubarth Ranch, where he bred a number of other exotic animals, including mountain goats and other ungulates.
Eventually, Schubarth ended up with a single “pure genetic” male Marco Polo argali ram, which he named the Montana Mountain King, or MMK. He then bred MMK with several ewes on the ranch, all of which were species that were also banned from Montana, and he began harvesting semen from MMK in 2018. He and his co-conspirators used forged veterinarian documents to move the sheep over state borders, where they sold some of the hybridized offspring along with straws of MMK’s semen.
Marco Polo argali are under the international protection of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. They are also listed under the Endangered Species Act and are banned from Montana. The ban is intended to protect native wild sheep species from potentially devastating diseases and hybridization.
“On occasion, Schubarth sold MMK semen directly to sheep breeders in other states,” the DOJ press release reads. “…at least two sheep from the scheme died from Johne’s disease. Johne’s disease is a contagious, chronic wasting disease easily spread between animals directly or through environmental contamination.”
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On top of the six-month prison sentence, Schubarth also has to pay a $20,000 fine to the Lacey Act Reward Fund, a $4,000 payment to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, and a $200 special assessment. The case remains under investigation as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks coordinate to bring the co-conspirators to justice.
“Schubarth’s criminal conduct is not how Montanans treat our wildlife population,” U.S. attorney Jesse Laslovich said in the press release. “Indeed, his actions threatened Montana’s native wildlife species for no other reason than he and his co-conspirators wanted to make more money. Schubarth’s greed drove their conspiracy to bring to Montana parts of the largest sheep in the world from Kyrgyzstan. Such actions to create hybrid animals are as unnatural as they are illegal, and I applaud the extensive collaboration and diligence of all of our law enforcement partners to bring Schubarth to justice.”