So you’re a rancher, and your sheep keep getting pneumonia. What do you do? If you’re Jack Schubarth, you implant them with cloned embryos of a bigger, hardier species—like, say, the Marco Polo argali. So what if it lives only in Central Asia? All you need is some DNA (Kyrgyzstan is only a 30-hour flight!) and a dream. For New York, Alice Hines tells the tale of Schubarth and his large adult ovine son, Montana Mountain King. Turns out this is only the tip of the ram’s horn; all over the country, startups are cloning and gene-editing their way to all kinds of animals.
The process turned out to be so seamless that soon Schubarth attracted customers. Fellow ranchers from all over the U.S. seemed to be convinced of Schubarth’s hypothesis that argali sheep would help herd health or at least be especially valuable as trophies. Ranchers showed up from Texas and Ohio with trailers full of contraband black-Hawaiian, Phantom, and Stumberg ewes to get impregnated by MMK. (In an effort to protect the wild bighorn population, Montana regulates the import of non-native sheep. Wild bighorns are extremely valuable to the state: Last year, a tag to shoot one in the wilderness sold at auction for $380,000.) The Texas and Ohio ranchers had to forge vet transport paperwork to get them across state lines, per court documents. Ellen Schubarth says her husband wasn’t in it for the money and only ever broke even from the scheme.
These were heady days for the sheep-fanatic community, which was creating hybrid species never before seen in the country — or anywhere else, for that matter. “I have a dream!” one hunting guide wrote on Facebook. “And that has been to create an exotic ram that looks like a native North American ram. I have rams now with 40 plus inch curls, one and a quarter curls, 12 inch bases, 250 pounds, and tall! This is a dream come true! Praise the Lord!”
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