this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2024
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Montana man gets 6 months in prison for cloning giant sheep and breeding it (apnews.com)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by Emperor to c/andfinally
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An 81-year-old Montana man was sentenced Monday to six months in federal prison for illegally using tissue and testicles from large sheep hunted in Central Asia and the U.S. to create hybrid sheep for captive trophy hunting in Texas and Minnesota.

U.S. District Court Judge Brian Morris said he struggled to come up with a sentence for Arthur “Jack” Schubarth of Vaughn, Montana. He said he weighed Schubarth’s age and lack of a criminal record with a sentence that would deter anyone else from trying to “change the genetic makeup of the creatures” on the earth.

...

Schubarth’s attorney, Jason Holden, said cloning the giant Marco Polo sheep hunted in Kyrgyzstan in 2013 has ruined his client’s “life, reputation and family.”

“I think this has broken him,” Holden said.

Holden, in seeking a probationary sentence, argued that Schubarth was a hard-working man who has always cared for animals and did something that no one else could have done in cloning the giant sheep, which he named Montana Mountain King or MMK.

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[–] Emperor 18 points 1 month ago (1 children)

According to the DoJ press release:

A Montana man was sentenced today to six months in prison for committing two felony wildlife crimes — a conspiracy to violate the Lacey Act and substantively violating the Lacey Act — as part of an almost decade-long effort to create giant sheep hybrids in the United States with an aim to sell the species to captive hunting facilities.

...

Schubarth brought parts of the largest sheep in the world, Marco Polo argali sheep (Ovis ammon polii), from Kyrgyzstan into the United States without declaring the importation. Average males can weigh more than 300 pounds, with horns that span more than five feet. Marco Polo argali are native to the high elevations of the Pamir region of Central Asia. They are protected internationally by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) and domestically by the Endangered Species Act, and are prohibited in the State of Montana to protect native sheep from disease and hybridization.

...

“Schubarth not only violated federal and state law and international treaties, but he and others illegally conspired to conceal their actions from authorities,” said Assistant Attorney General Todd Kim of the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division. “Violations of the Lacey Act, CITES and other laws can be devastating for our domestic populations of wild animals, which is why we are unwavering in our commitment to enforce them.”

....

The Lacey Act prohibits interstate trade in wildlife that has been taken, possessed, transported or sold in violation of federal or state law. The Lacey Act also prohibits the interstate sale of wildlife that has been falsely labeled. The Act is one of the most powerful tools the United States has to combat wildlife trafficking and prevent ecological invasion by injurious wildlife.

So while he violated a raft of international, regional and state laws, it was the Lacey Act that they used to convict him.

[–] Bob_Robertson_IX@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 month ago

So... my dreams of introducing the European Hedgehog to the American Midwest would violate federal and state laws as well as international treaties? Damn.