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.
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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.
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
That was just his lawyer trying to downplay the risk of someone else doing this so that his client isn’t used as an example to try to deter others. I would think that 6 months in prison probably isn’t going to deter many people who would put forth the effort to spend a decade working on a project like this.