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United States

The US Has a Cloned Sheep Contraband Problem (wired.com) 109

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Federal authorities are grappling with the aftermath of an illegal sheep cloning operation that has scattered hundreds of contraband hybrid animals across multiple states, following the sentencing of the scheme's mastermind. Montana rancher Arthur Schubarth received a six-month prison term for cloning a near-threatened Marco Polo argali sheep from tissue illegally imported from Kyrgyzstan.

The cloned animal, named Montana Mountain King, was used to inseminate over 100 ewes, creating a network of unauthorized hybrid offspring. Court documents reveal that Schubarth sold these hybrids to big game hunting enthusiasts, with prices reaching $10,000 per animal. While the original cloned sheep is now housed at New York's Rosamond Gifford Zoo, authorities cannot account for most of its descendants.
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The US Has a Cloned Sheep Contraband Problem More

The US Has a Cloned Sheep Contraband Problem

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  • The IMPORTANT question is... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cayenne8 ( 626475 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2024 @03:58PM (#64940743) Homepage Journal
    Ok..so the important question is...HOW DOES IT TASTE?!?!?!

    • Re:The IMPORTANT question is... Why New York? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by MDMurphy ( 208495 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2024 @04:05PM (#64940757)
      The important question is why NY? They just killed a squirrel and a raccoon that were indigenous to the area. Now they import a freakishly large sheep?

      • Re:The IMPORTANT question is... Why New York? (Score:5, Funny)

        by glowimperial ( 705397 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2024 @04:55PM (#64940947)

        The important question is why NY? They just killed a squirrel and a raccoon that were indigenous to the area. Now they import a freakishly large sheep?

        Sheep of unusual size? I don't believe they exist.

        • When will the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and other federal and state level regulatory agencies going to prohibit importation, breeding or raising non-native species in the USA?

          Multiple parts:
          - Preventing importation of new species (animal, plant, etc.)
          - Preventing breeding and sale of existing non-native species
          - Prevent sale, raising, etc. of non-native plant species

          The "It's too big of a problem" can be solved by going one species at a time or by groups of

          • https://feralhogs.extension.or... [extension.org]

            "mature male feral hogs (also called wild hogs; Sus scrofa) possess a thickened subcutaneous layer of tissue, commonly referred to as the “shield” or “shoulder plate,” which overlies the outermost muscles in the boar’s lateral shoulder region"

            "Anecdotal accounts state that a boar’s shield is dense enough to stop both bullets and arrows; however, this reported ability of these structures has not been either tested or confirmed scientificall

          • When will the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and other federal and state level regulatory agencies going to prohibit importation, breeding or raising non-native species in the USA?

            I dunno, like sometime in the past, I guess. Did you miss the two uses of the word "illegal" and the word "sentenced" in the summary?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by rossdee ( 243626 )

      If they're cloning endangered sheep its probably more for the wool than the meat.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      Like sheep. Being a cloned sheep doesn't change the taste from the original. It's the same proteins.

  • Dirty deeds (Score:5, Funny)

    by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2024 @03:58PM (#64940745)

    Done with (cloned) sheep.

  • 6 Months? (Score:3)

    by ThurstonMoore ( 605470 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2024 @03:59PM (#64940747)

    Why only 6 months in jail?

    • Re:6 Months? (Score:5, Informative)

      by aldousd666 ( 640240 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2024 @04:10PM (#64940771) Journal
      Because it's a non-violent offense and they don't lock people up for long on those? Nobody was hurt, this is just a regulation violation.

      • Re:6 Months? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by dknj ( 441802 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2024 @04:19PM (#64940801) Journal

        the dude who did it is also like 81 years old. if he were younger, like say 25, he would have gotten jailtime in years rather than months to prevent repeat offenders

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 )

          You'd give a 25 year old years in prison for sheep cloning? In the same country we don't even prosecute many real felonies that hurt real people?

        • Nope. 18 USC 42 (b) (b) Whoever violates this section, or any regulation issued pursuant thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by ichthus ( 72442 )
      Too bad he didn't work for EcoHealth Alliance. He'd have gotten off scott free.

    • Because violation of the law in question carries a maximum 6 month jail sentence. Also it wasn't just prison, it was also a $25k fine. He literally got the maximum sentence.

      18 USC 42 (b) (b) Whoever violates this section, or any regulation issued pursuant thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.

  • Redneck Cloning (Score:4)

    by Bill, Shooter of Bul ( 629286 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2024 @03:59PM (#64940749) Journal
    It seems kind of funny that cloning is so easy that some dude can just do it outside of a multibillion dollar research lab. I'm sure I couldn't do it in my back yard yet or download dna from the internet and reproduce life forms in my back yard yet. But its come a long way, and it seems with in reach if there was a market for random genomed animals.

    • Re:Redneck Cloning (Score:4, Informative)

      by bickerdyke ( 670000 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2024 @04:11PM (#64940773)

      (...) or download dna from the internet and reproduce life forms in my back yard yet

      Well.... downloading DNA from the internet and printing out the DNA seems to be surprisingly cheap: https://www.labx.com/categorie... [labx.com]
        Don't know about growing anything from that.

      • You can't grow anything from DNA, you need and already living organism. And even then there's mitochondrial DNA, RNA, and a bunch of other things that have to be 'just right'.

        What you can do, though, is get DNA for one kind of sheep and put it in the egg of a sheep of another kind and then let nature produce a sheep that will be almost, but not quite, what you trying to duplicate. It starts to get exponentially more complex a procedure to do anything less basic.

        I'm still surprised that is now an option ou

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      You can actually. Kits to insert genes into bacteria are cheap and common. Example: https://www.bio-rad.com/en-ca/... [bio-rad.com]

      Once you can do that, writing custom DNA and getting it printed into plasmids is reasonably straightforward.

      Scaling up to multicellular organisms is a bit harder, although people have been cloning plants for thousands of years. For mammals it's still a back yard accessible activity though:

      https://www.newscientist.com/a... [newscientist.com]
      https://jasbsci.biomedcentral.... [biomedcentral.com]

      The cloning in this story is a bit of a

      • Indeed, I'm sure he would have been much happier to import a few breeding pair. That can work out terribly (Burmese python) but I believe it has also worked out well (Ostriches) in some cases. ar

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Now they can F! their relatives twice!

  • Why is this illegal? (Score:3)

    by ByTor-2112 ( 313205 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2024 @04:04PM (#64940755)

    He's breeding sheep, who cares??? He isn't cloning a T-Rex.

    • Bringing live/viable animal/plant/whatever products is usually regulated to prevent unwanted pests/non-native species from disrupting the local ecosystem.

      Even within the United States, there are similar rules involving interstate commerce and, in some cases (such as quarantine enforcement), intrastate commerce.

      • The subtitle for the wired article calls it a "giant" sheep species. So presumably invasive spread, as would be expected, is the concern. I wonder if importing the parts and then cloning it was an intentional way to circumvent the import regulations, it doesn't seem to say in a clear way. That would seem of unclear legality on its face, as importing parts is maybe not illegal, and neither is cloning. The article says the owner contracted with a lab to make the clone, and I would presume there is some pa
      • He didn't bring a live/viable animal. He brought a small amount of tissue used for cloning. That doesn't mean that these cloned sheep couldn't cause similar ecosystem disruption. But he most certainly didn't bring a live animal.

        • âoeInstantiated a live animalâ is probably a better way to phrase his offense.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by HiThere ( 15173 )

          They're giant sheep. They won't cause any problem that an open hunting season won't fix.

          • You'd think that, but it might not be true. Someone brought some wild boars [hogs] to west Texas to hunt on a private ranch and they got loose. Now they're all over the place and they're aggressive. They've multiplied enough there are even "boar signs" on the major highways to tell you to watch out for one because hitting one would be like hitting a bull (bad for your car and for you) ... all of that with an active year-round hunting season (hunting license may be required in some situations). Seriously, yo

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by HiThere ( 15173 )

              Big horn sheep generally prefer rough terrain, often with lots of elevation. These are supposed to be similar. They might be aggressive, but in places that people don't go without special reasons. (Adonis wasn't killed by a sheep!)

        • Remember how fast they hunted all the buffalo.

          Giant animals that can be hunted don't survive in the land with the most firearms.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      Probably same fear as hogs in some places. No/insufficient natural predators and pathogens for that type of animal, so it spreads out of control and starts causing damage to humans.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by mysidia ( 191772 )

        I'd say comparison to hogs would seem unreasonable on its face

        Sheep are generally not dangerous and barely exist in the wild and can't breed in large numbers with a low turnover rate - each generation
        have to be nearly a year old before they can breed once a year giving birth to a few compared to hogs starting to breed at 4 months old 2 to 3 times a year.

        In Montana there's approximately 5000 wild sheep population compared to 150,000 head farm sheep. Sheep have an extremely adept natural predator, and it's

    • Cloning a T-Rex would be of less consequence than recklessly enabling crossbreeding of non-native herd animals. A cloned T-Rex breaks loose from a Montana ranch, problem is solved when winter arrives. If botched genetic traits get introduced across herds, it gets real messy & expensive to eradicate.
      • A cloned T-Rex breaks loose from a Montana ranch, problem is solved when winter arrives.

        Are you sure? T-Rex could very well have been warm-blooded [bbc.co.uk].

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by HiThere ( 15173 )

          Probably it was warm-blooded, but it was also probably big enough that it didn't matter. Cube volume for energy generation but square surface for energy dissipation. Large animals don't need to be warm blooded to maintain their heat. (Living in the ocean is a special case, as water conducts heat really well. OTOH, oceans never freeze except at the surface.)

    • So somehow all the invasive species disaster stories have slid right past you? Killer bees, anyone?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Just wait until it's humans. Try fixing that mess.

    • Indeed invasive species have never hurt anything, Australia worked out fine right?

    • He isn't cloning a T-Rex.

      So what cloning would you allow without any regulation? That's really the issue. Unlike breeding cloning can lead to new species being introduced into environments where they can become problems. As crimes go it is pretty minor and he only got 6 months but I think it is quite reasonable that there are legal regulations around techniques like cloning since the science is quite new and all the implications are not yet fully worked out..

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cusco ( 717999 )

        Imagine his conversation in the prison lunch room. "What are you in for?"
        "I killed the cashier and a couple customers to rob a convenience store. What about you?"
        "I cloned an endangered sheep."
        "No, really, what are you in for?"

        • You do realize that most countries have different types of prisons and classification of prisoners right? Cloning sheep will almost certainly end you up in a low security prison with other white collar criminals convicted for things like tax dodging, perjury, insider trading etc.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by cusco ( 717999 )

            Of course, when you're referring to State and Federal prisons. Local jails are another story, they're all tossed together into one pot, crack dealers with computer hackers, child molesters with pickpockets. The guys who founded what became Diebold's election machine division were a computer hacker and a coke dealer who met in the King County Jail in Seattle (Diebold of course kept the computer hacker on when they bought their company.)

    • the general population. And our tech isn't anywhere near ready to tell.

      Selective breeding is relatively safe, but we still manage to fuck things up periodically and we've lost a few species that way.

      Now take that and speed it up by about 1000% and you're just asking for trouble. It'd be easy to have a bunch of traits that make the sheep very profitable in the short term and then blow up in our faces by killing them in mass.
    • You don't need a T-Rex to terrorise a small farm & the surrounding area. Sheep'll do just fine if you clone 'em right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • He might use pretty much the same techniques to breed a virus. Which, as we saw 5 years ago, causes ⦠issues

  • Such a bad idea (Score:5, Interesting)

    by smap77 ( 1022907 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2024 @04:09PM (#64940769)

    In 1970s and prior, terrestrial rabies was confined to Florida and the deep southern states. In 1977 hunters in VA started importing Florida raccoons for hunting. All that east coast rabies nowadays is descended from those imported raccoons.

    One wonders what could be transmitting around with these critters and what we'll all be looking back at Montana as the origin of in a decade or two?

    • It's unlikely that the offspring harbor any pathogen not already endemic in native sheep since the cloned embryo was implanted in a native species. Beyond the original clone, unlike when breeding pairs of non-native animals are brought in, all of the offspring are hybrids. I understand why these regulations need to be enforced. But this case doesn't seem to be that serious. We might even decide that the hybrid offspring make better farm animals.
  • You run across people like this sometimes. They'll kick their dog in front of children, then tell you how "cruel" it is that they have to pay taxes.
    • You mean 2 faced people? Pot, meet kettle. I guarantee that you, like every one of us, does significant things which disrespect life. Taking driving for example - significant impact on other creatures, major impact on human youth too.
      • Comparing laziness (i.e., lack of sainthood) with active contempt only serves the latter. A guy who sells live-action animal snuff experiences is lower than most forms of toilet scum in the best of circumstances. This POS somehow managed to go darker than that without telling someone to "put the lotion on its skin."
    • Kick their dog? There are people who will separate children from their mothers and lock them both in separate cages because the two dared to flee political violence largely caused by their own country's failed drug policy and tell you how "cruel" it is that they have to pay taxes.
      • Yeah, I was trying to suggest something about the banality of evil. Much worse things happen, but the most insidious damage people with low compassion do is in little daily insults to life and humanity. Lack of the simple recognition most people have that there's anything real outside themselves. Cruelty to animals is the most common and poorly-concealed warning sign of the "inadequately souled."
  • These illegal foreign sheep are coming to take the jobs of American sheep! Whats next?

  • Big game sheep hunting? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2024 @05:06PM (#64940981) Homepage

    I know some hunters will shoot at anything on four legs, but sheep? Something about that doesn't seem sporting at all; that'd be like hunting cattle. If that's the level of someone's hunting skills they should pick up a different hobby and stick to the grocery store.

    • These sheep have head mounted lasers and camouflaged wool.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by sleeves ( 939679 )
      Marco Polo argali sheep look very similar to North America's bighorn sheep, with the wrap-around horns. I imagine most of the offspring went to hunting ranches where well heeled trophy "hunters" could collect an apparent trophy without having to win a permit to hunt a real bighorn sheep. Not many bighorn permits are issued and most are by lottery.
    • But the imagine the huge white "dandelion" puff when scoring a direct hit.

    • Its for the big horns you get to mount on the wall.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

      It's sporting because they're using standardized sheep. Easy or hard, it's the same challenge for everyone.

    • Why is a sheep different from any other target? Most hunters shoot animals standing around (with the exception of bird hunters). There's nothing sporting about it. These sheep were specially bred with horns that make nice trophies. Nothing more.

      Hunting for anything other than food is a coward's game.

      • Tell me you've never hunted without telling me you've never hunted. Of course, if you're in a place like New Jersey, which has more deer than people it seems, that might be true, I suppose.
    • I know of no hunters who hunt domestic sheep, which is probably the animals to which you refer. Now, bighorn sheep are smart (for sheep) and clamber up what appears to me as a human to be things that can't be climbed. Never hunted them myself, as I'm only "meh" on sheep meat, and in my ethos not eating what you kill is a waste. Are there twits of hunters who really need a different hobby? Of course. But they're not as common as you might think .

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      There are still places in the Midwest where you can go to shoot a farm-raised buffalo. They'll mount your trophy for you for an additional fee.

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