A Montana man has been charged with trafficking and conspiracy under federal law for cloning a Marco Polo sheep as well as breeding and selling its offspring and DNA across several states.
The defendant, Arthur “Jack” Schubarth, entered into a plea agreement with federal officials for one count of Lacey Act trafficking and one count of conspiracy to violate the Lacey Act.
According to Forest Legality, the Lacey Act, initially enacted in 1900, is a United States law that bans the trafficking of fish, wildlife, or plants that are illegally taken, possessed, transported, or sold.
Schbarth and five others, who federal officials labeled in court documents as Persons A-E, were allegedly involved in various activities. Three are from Texas, one from Montana, and another from Minnesota.
Court papers cite the following claims:
*On or about January 25, 2013, Person A entered the United States with biological tissue from a Marco Polo argali sheep that had been hunted in Kyrgyzstan. Person A did not declare the animal parts upon entry.
*On or about January 31, 2013, Schubarth entered into a “Cell Storage Agreement” with a corporation for storage and preservation of the above-referenced tissue from a male “Marco Polo” sheep named “Rocky.”
*On or about October 6, 2015, Schubarth entered into an “Ovine Cloning Contract” to clone an unspecified number of Marco Polo sheep from the tissue. He provided a deposit of $4,200 for the cloning.
* On or about November 22, 2016, Schubarth received 165 cloned Marco Polo embryos at the Schubarth Ranch.
*On or about May 15, 2017, a pure Marco Polo argali sheep male was born from the cloned embryos Schubarth named “Montana Mountain King.”
*Starting in 2018 at the latest, Schubarth harvested semen from M1\.1K to inseminate ewes via LAP-AI to create Marco Polo argali hybrid offspring.
Other notes from the case involved sending semen straws from MMK to Texas as well as transferring its offspring to Texas.
This is the first criminal case involving wildlife cloning, and it has potentially significant implications across several areas of the wildlife world.
Cloning At The Highest Levels
While cloning wildlife might be a shock to many within the hunting community, it has been a reality at the highest levels in the world of endangered wildlife management for several years.
On December 10, 2020, “Elizabeth Ann,” a black-footed ferret, was cloned from the frozen cells of “Willa,” a specimen that lived in the 1980s as part of a U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service project that involved scientists at Revive & Restore (a cloning conservation group), ViaGen Pets & Equine, San Diego Zoo Global, and the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.
“The Service sought the expertise of valued recovery partners to help us explore how we might overcome genetic limitations hampering the recovery of the black-footed ferret, and we’re proud to make this announcement today,” said Noreen Walsh, Director of the Service’s Mountain-Prairie Region.
“Although this research is preliminary, it is the first cloning of a native endangered species in North America, and it provides a promising tool for continued efforts to conserve the black-footed ferret.”
“Maintaining and increasing wild populations and suitable habitat continues to be essential for black-footed ferret recovery and will remain a priority for the Service. Successful genetic cloning does not diminish the importance of addressing habitat-based threats to the species or the Service’s focus on addressing habitat conservation and management to recover black-footed ferrets.”
In 2024, Service and its genetic research partners announced the birth of two more black-footed ferret clones – known as “Noreen” and “Antonia” both cloned from the same frozen specimen as Elizabeth Ann, who is alive and thriving at the ferret program’s headquarters in Fort Collins, CO.
Service officials said the application of this technology to endangered species addresses specific genetic diversity and disease concerns associated with black-footed ferrets.
“The Service views this new potential tool as one of many strategies to aid species recovery alongside efforts to address habitat challenges and other barriers to recovery.”
In February 2023, a cloned Przewalski’s horse, a native of Mongolia, was born at the ViaGen Pets & Equine cloning facility in Texas and was moved to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park.
According to San Diego Zoo officials, “Ollie” is a clone of a male Przewalski’s horse stallion whose living cell line was cryopreserved over 40 years ago in the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance Biodiversity Bank’s Frozen Zoo.
“The world’s first cloned Przewalski’s horse, Kurt, also living at the Safari Park, is the genetic twin of the foal, as he was born in August 2020 from the same stallion’s living cell line.”
And although ferret cloning is groundbreaking in several ways, it is not the first wild animal cloned at a governmental level. It happened with wild sheep back in 2015..
According to The Guardian, Iran’s Royan Institute researchers cloned a wild Isfahan mouflon using a domestic sheep as a surrogate mother.
“We have been working on the project for around four years,” project head Mohammad Hossein Nasr-Esfahan, told the Guardian.
“Conservation of wildlife is an important concept in developing countries, and so far, a few successful projects involving the birth of wild animals by interspecies cloning have been achieved worldwide.”
It’s Not Just Cloning
Cloning should not be considered a stand-alone technology leap when it comes to wildlife. In my journalistic pursuit of the topic, it keeps overlapping with gene editing.
Gene editing allows scientists to modify the DNA of wild animals with precision. By employing tools such as CRISPR-Cas9, researchers can target specific genes within an organism’s genome, enabling them to insert, delete, or alter genetic material.
The process begins by identifying the genetic traits that need modification. DNA sequences are then precisely cut and altered, a task facilitated by CRISPR’s ‘molecular scissors.’ These edits can be designed to emulate genetic variations lost to time, essentially rewilding species with traits that once allowed them to thrive.
Once the desired genetic changes are made, the edited cells are cultivated and used to create embryos, which can be implanted into surrogate mothers, much like the process of cloning.
Theoretically, in the context of wildlife, gene editing holds the promise of conserving endangered species and restoring genetic diversity. An example would be the aforementioned black-footed ferret, where officials have openly discussed disease resistance as a potential target of gene editing.
If it works with ferrets, could it be used to help fight Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae in wild sheep or chronic wasting disease in deer, elk, and moose?
No one knows for sure.
Interestingly, on the sheep front, USDA officials have been involved in genetic improvement programs for various livestock, including sheep, focusing on disease resistance.
With deer species and CWD in particular, there have already been discussions about the potential to research the use of this technology.
But there are huge concerns, some of which have never been published until now.
A Two-Edged Sword
Gene editing has largely been presented to the public in the context of eliminating disease potentials and genetic bottlenecks in rare species.
But there’s more, and it involves “gene drivers.”
Gene drivers are genetic systems that increase the likelihood of a particular gene being passed onto offspring. They can spread genetic modification rapidly through a population and can also be tinkered with through gene editing.
The Wyss Institute at Harvard University has been working on this about rats and has published several statements.
“Since the 1940s, researchers have thought of using gene drives to eradicate populations of pests and disease vectors and to reduce or eliminate invasive species that wreak havoc on natural ecosystems.”
“Deployed willfully in human intervention efforts, a propagated dominant gene modification could, for example, by biasing the production of one sex over the other over many generations, force a deleterious disease vector to decline and lose its dangerous potential.”
The key example is editing genes for females only to produce males so that, eventually, populations are eliminated. Wyss Institute officials have done research on this in relation to harmful insects, but it is already being discussed in the realm of invasive rat populations on islands.
Patrice Kohl, an assistant professor at UCF’s Nicholson School of Communication and Media, was the lead author of a study about public opinion on gene editing and wildlife published in Conservation Biology.
The study analyzed data from a nationally representative survey of 1,600 U.S. adults between December 2016 and January 2017. Here are a few outtakes
*Overall, respondents significantly perceived the risks of gene editing wildlife as outweighing the benefits.
*More than 80 percent of respondents believed gene editing in wildlife to be at least somewhat risky to nature and humans.
*Between 55 and 63 percent of respondents thought gene editing would benefit nature and humans.
*Individuals who strongly believe in the authority of scientific knowledge perceived gene editing in wildlife as more beneficial and less risky.
*Respondents found gene editing to help species survive more morally acceptable than using it to reduce or eliminate species.
*Despite skepticism about the technology, respondents might still support gene editing for wildlife management.
In an article published by the University, Kohl asked an intriguing question.
“What if you introduce a gene-edited rat to reduce their populations on an island, and then that rat escapes the island, and you drive that rat species extinct?” Kohl says.
“That has consequences for everyone across the entire planet.”
Implications For The Future
Just like artificial intelligence has changed the world radically in a short span, cloning, and gene editing will experience similar leaps in advancement and be employed even more in wildlife management.
In reality, cloned Marco Polo sheep on ranches would on the surface present no more of a threat to wild sheep for example than dozens of different domestic varieties or species like aoudad. If importing these sheep and someone propagating them for hunting had been legal and done under specific guidelines, there wouldn’t be a story here.
But what happened here takes us into entirely new territory.
Is it possible that unchecked cloning could make cloned specimens and their offspring inadvertently more susceptible to health issues that spread to native wildlife?
If the illegal cloning of wild sheep started in 2015, what about gene editing of herds of various animals?
Are there herds that have gene-edited specimens that might cause them to grow larger horns, grow more quickly, or have better reproduction but also have negative side effects that could impact wild sheep that come in contact with them?
When I first started investigating this story, I contacted Texas Parks & Wildlife Big Game Program Director Mitch Lockwood and asked about the legality of cloning wildlife in Texas.
“TPWD does not have regulatory authority over exotic wildlife, but cloning white-tailed deer and mule deer is prohibited,” Lockwood said.
That means exotic stock like red sheep, axis deer, or markhor, all of which are successfully propagated in a thriving exotic hunting market, could be cloned or have gene editing done.
Technology is neutral. What is done with it can either do great good or completely the opposite.
Whether we like it or not, cloning and gene editing are now part of the equation of wildlife, and it has already involved wild sheep.
We’ve entered a brave new world where, for the first time in my career, a story seems more like science fiction than reality, so I find it proper to end with something Steven Spielberg, director of Jurassic Park, said about cloning during the film’s media promotion.
He called cloning of wildlife “A science of eventuality.”
Anthropologist Hendrik Poinar more recently said, “I laughed when Steven Spielberg said that cloning extinct animals was inevitable. But I’m not laughing anymore…”
If a man from Montana can spend a few thousand dollars and send argali tissue to Mexico and get cloned embryos sent back to his ranch, what other wildlife has already been cloned?
What impact could it have on native wildlife?
That’s the question we need to be asking.
Chester Moore
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