How big are these sheep? An average male can weigh over 300 pounds with horns over 5 feet wide, giving them the largest sheep horns on the planet. The sheep are endangered and protected by both international treaties and U.S. law. Montana also forbids the import of these foreign sheep or their parts in an effort to protect local American sheep from disease.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
An 80-year-old man in Montana pleaded guilty Tuesday to two felony wildlife crimes involving his plan to let paying customers hunt sheep on private ranches.
“Schubarth then implanted the embryos in ewes on his ranch, resulting in a single, pure genetic male Marco Polo argali that he named ‘Montana Mountain King’ or MMK,” federal authorities wrote in a press release.
Schubart also forged veterinarian inspection certificates to transport the new hybrid sheep under false pretenses, and sometimes even sold semen from his Montana Mountain King to other breeders in the U.S.
Schubart sent 15 artificially inseminated sheep to Minnesota in 2018 and sold 37 straws of Montana Mountain King’s semen to someone in Texas, according to an indictment filed last month.
“This was an audacious scheme to create massive hybrid sheep species to be sold and hunted as trophies,” assistant Attorney General Todd Kim from the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division said in a press release.
“In pursuit of this scheme, Schubarth violated international law and the Lacey Act, both of which protect the viability and health of native populations of animals,” Kim continued.
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