--- title: "‘It’s Trailer Park Chemistry.’ A Hybrid Bighorn Sheep Is on the Lam and That Could Be Bad News for Wild Herds" description: "The lost hybrid sheep comes from the same game farm where the infamous ‘Montana Mountain King’ frankenram was bred." date: "2026-10-29" modified: "2026-10-29" authors: - name: "Andrew McKean" job_title: "Hunting and Conservation Editor" link: "https://www.outdoorlife.com/authors/andrew-mckean.md" url: "https://www.outdoorlife.com/hunting/hybrid-bighorn-sheep-escapes-in-montana/" categories: - "Big Game Hunting" - "Conservation" - "Hunting" - "Sheep Hunting" - "Wildlife Management" tags: - "News" --- # ‘It’s Trailer Park Chemistry.’ A Hybrid Bighorn Sheep Is on the Lam and That Could Be Bad News for Wild Herds ![mountain sheep]() *Artur Widak via Getty Images* The two-paragraph Sept. 18 [news release]() from Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks raised more questions than it may have intended. The department “is seeking help from the public to locate a hybridized female rocky mountain bighorn sheep that went missing from a private alternative livestock facility near Vaughn in early September,” the release from FWP’s Region 4 office in Great Falls stated. “The bighorn ewe is described as weighing about 120 pounds and is primarily white in color with a red ear tag.” The news release stressed wildlife officials’ concern that the ewe could come into contact with wild bighorn sheep in the vicinity. Domestic sheep are often vectors for pathogens that can fatally infect wild sheep. What the news release didn’t disclose is that the “alternative livestock facility” in question is owned by Arthur “Jack” Schubarth, who was convicted in 2024 of violating the federal Lacey Act in his pursuit to create giant hybrid bighorn rams. Schubarth [pleaded guilty]() to helping smuggle genetic material from Marco Polo argali sheep from Kyrgyzstan into the United States in order to clone the ram and create a “super sheep” with huge spiraling horns and resistance to the pathogens that infect North American wild sheep. His quest was enabled by Montana hunting outfitter John Lewton, who [lopped off the testicles]() of his clients’ trophy wild bighorns, kept the gonads on ice, and later sold them to Schubarth. The idea, Schubarth later told court officials, was to use the genetic material to incubate hybrid sheep with horns larger than any North American rams. Lewton was sentenced last week in federal court in Billings and received a $20,000 fine and a year of probation for his part in the genetic alchemy. As a condition of his federal-court sentence, Lewton is prohibited from outfitting or guiding hunters for a full year. ## ‘Trailer Park Chemistry’ The notion that a “Frankenram” could be produced with a combination of cloned embryos and artificial insemination isn’t an abstraction. In 2017, Schubarth actually produced what he called the [Montana Mountain King](), a pure cloned Marco Polo ram birthed to a surrogate bighorn ewe. Schubarth subsequently bred offspring of the Montana Mountain King to captive bighorn ewes on his farm west of Great Falls. It’s one of these ewes that has now gone missing, according to Fish, Wildlife & Parks. Schubarth’s genetic hermetics has both baffled and impressed wildlife investigators, who told *Outdoor Life* that the sort of reproductive science that Schubarth practiced is normally limited to hospitals, universities, and other science centers with state-of-the-art facilities. “The best way to describe his operation is trailer-park chemistry,” said a source familiar with the case who spoke on background. “He’s pulled off a pretty high-level genetics program with hardware-store gear and limited resources.” Schubarth [received probation]() for his guilty plea to the Lacey Act violations. In his petition to the federal court for leniency, Schubarth’s attorney, Jason Holden, noted his client’s contribution to the science of wildlife propagation. “Jack is an 81-year-old non-violent man,” Holden wrote in 2024. “His crime, the cloning of a Marco Polo Sheep from Kyrgyzstan, has ruined his life, reputation and family. Jack did something no one else could, or has ever done. On a ranch, in a barn in Montana, he created Montana Mountain King. MMK is an extraordinary animal, born of science, and from a man who, if he could rewrite history, would have left the challenge of cloning a Marco Polo to only the imagination of Michael Crichton.” **Read Next: [Montana Man Charged for Illegally Cloning and Breeding Marco Polo Sheep from Central Asia]()** ## Was the Sheep Sold? The department’s all-points-bulletin asking the public to report a lone and roaming ewe may not produce any sightings. That’s because there’s a possibility that the ewe isn’t actually on the lam. She may have been sold to an out-of-state game farm, said sources who spoke to *Outdoor Life* on the condition that they wouldn’t be identified based on the speculative nature of their hunches. Schubarth, who is on probation from the 2024 federal wildlife-trafficking charges, has been charged by FWP with failure to report the escape of an animal permitted in his commercial wildlife operation, according to charging documents at the Cascade County District Court in Montana. The “game farm” permit requires that if anything escapes the permitted facility, owners must report within 48 hours to both FWP and the Montana Department of Livestock. “According to our records, the ewe in question reportedly escaped on Sept. 2, and our game wardens heard about it the next week,” says Dave Hagengruber, FWP’s public information officer in the Great Falls regional office. “Wardens went out to talk with Schubarth in mid-September, and he basically said, ‘Oh yeah, I meant to tell you.’” Schubarth told wardens the ewe likely escaped either over a fence damaged by a wind storm or through a gate accidentally left open at the end of his property, beyond lines of kennels of dogs that produce puppies sold in [Schubarth’s pet store]() in Great Falls. Assuming the ewe did leave Schubarth’s facility, it could pose a risk to the region’s wild sheep. “Cascade is 30 miles from his farm, and there’s a sizeable band of \[wild\] bighorns there,” says Hagengruber. “The Birdtail Hills are 20 to 25 miles to the west, and there are bighorns in those hills. The Rocky Mountain Front, home to Montana’s most treasured bighorn sheep herd, is 60 or 70 miles west. Fortunately, this is not a ram, so it’s less likely to roam widely, but the threat of disease transmission is a significant concern. That’s why we want to hear of any sightings. It’s Jack’s property and his responsibility to locate and return to his facility, but we can’t have this hybrid sheep potentially contacting wild bands.” ## Fate of a Freak ![tilek sheep]() *Tilek, the pure cloned Marco Polo ram taken in by the* *Rosamond Gifford Zoo. Photo credit: Rosamond Gifford Zoo* Schubarth insists he did not sell the ewe, and suspects the fugitive sheep was killed by predators within a few miles of his facility in the Sun River Valley. “I haven’t heard anything about her, and to my knowledge Fish and Game hasn’t heard anything for five weeks now,” Schubarth said in an interview. “With all the people out looking, we haven’t seen it and no one’s called me. I’m assuming, with her lack of experience with predators, that a coyote got her.” Schubarth confirmed the ewe is a hybrid. “She’s mainly bighorn and probably three or four domestic crosses from the original cross that was 50 percent bighorn,” Schubarth said. “I added some more bighorn from that original \[parentage\]. So they’re probably 62.5 percent bighorn. They don’t have any experience of being wild. I’m pretty sure she would have watched coyotes walk right up to her” without trying to evade them. Schubarth further confirmed that he still has “around 45 head of sheep, is all” remaining on his 200-acre game farm. “All my sheep are sold right now and just waiting to leave. I’ve kept them back because I just want the pleasure of birthing out the lambs. It’s something I like to do, and at 83 years old, I like to see new life.” As for the descendants of the Montana Mountain King, Schubarth said that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service required him to destroy progeny of the cloned ram back in 2024. The federal court also required Schubarth to dispose of all hybrid bighorn sheep by Dec. 31, 2025, and to stop “from engaging in breeding activity of big game stock while on supervision,” according to sentencing documents. “We had 190 head of the hybrid Marco/bighorn here at the ranch and none of them got pneumonia in the three years I held them while waiting for a forever home for them. All were slaughtered,” he says. “I did sell some, 15 in all. There are some down in Texas, and every so often I see on Facebook somebody advertising a Marco Polo, but there’s no way they are more than about a quarter Marco” based on genetic dilution, he said. As for the Montana Mountain King himself, Schubarth says the ram ended up at a zoological park in upstate New York. Indeed, last summer the [Rosamond Gifford Zoo]() in Syracuse, New York, announced the acquisition of “Tilek,” the cloned argali at the center of Schubarth’s case. The ram had been held at an Oregon wildlife rehabilitation center for over three years before being moved to the Syracuse zoo. ## Measured Remorse Schubarth says “Tilek” would be about nine years old, but observed that he has not yet expressed the most distinctive trait of the Marco Polo subspecies of argali: its spiraling horns. “He’s basically still 54 to 57 inches,” says Schubarth. “He ought to have 75 inches of horn on each side. But this year they put him in a larger grass pen so maybe he’ll grow more. For safety’s sake, they should have castrated him so no more genetics could get out there. Maybe they did, for all I know. I’ll never see him again. I don’t ever leave my ranch.” Schubarth said that statements from prosecutors that he was motivated to create a hybrid ram with giant horns in order to upsell to commercial shooting operations are wrong. He was more interested in cross-breeding to create a bighorn race that might be resistant to what’s often called “M. ovi,” a respiratory disease that often results in catastrophic pneumonia-caused die-offs in wild sheep. “My thinking was that here’s this wild sheep that has evolved with domestic sheep for thousands of years,” says Schubarth of the Marco Polo, native to the high alpine plateaus of central Asia. “The feds and Fish and Game made it out that I was selling to the hunt community and only motivated to create bigger horns. In actuality, I was after the immune system, and the reality is that even after several generations, these Marco hybrids still seem to be immune to pneumonia. I think that’s the real story.” If he regrets anything about the misadventures of the Montana Mountain King, it’s that he trusted the lab that created the clone from genetic tissue smuggled from Kyrgyzstan. “I’ve been happy all my life except for this last foolishness about the Marco Polo,” Schubarth says. “I wouldn’t have done it had the cloning company not told me it was legal. They lied after they took $32,000 from me. That was the cost of stockpiling the tissue and making the embryos for me.” The rest of the genetic work was a cinch, he says. The surrogate bighorn ewes, most of which Schubarth bought from zoos in Canada and Colorado, were selected for their ability to carry the hybrid lamb. “Laparoscopic work is easy,” he says, and artificial insemination is an established livestock practice. The trick is creating a genetically manipulated zygote. “You take the egg and suck out the product and you put the material from the Marco Polo into the egg and implant it in a ewe. A little electricity, and poof, the thing starts to grow.” ## Disease Alert Schubarth says he will be entirely out of the game-breeding business by 2027. “Fish and Game has accomplished what they always wanted: to drive me out of business,” he says. Meanwhile, he says the captive-shooting industry is thriving. He cites high-fence operations in Kansas and [Texas]() that would pay top dollar for his hybrid bighorns while also insisting that he sold to fellow breeders, not trophy hunters. “The feds made it out that I was the center of this industry based on shooting animals in pens,” he says, before acknowledging that most of his animals probably met that fate. “Without the interest of the hunting community, these animals would be worthless and only sold for meat. So yes, the industry revolves around the harvesting of these animals by collectors.” Fish, Wildlife & Parks is less interested in the commercial than in the pathological outcome of the case. The state has struggled to establish bighorn sheep populations in prime habitat in the Missouri River Breaks and in the mountains of southwest Montana. Bands that thrive for years are often wiped out in a single season by pneumonia epizootics that often originate in domestic sheep. State game wardens are authorized to shoot on sight wild bighorns that contact domestic sheep. The fear is that a traveling ram could become infected by a domestic sheep, and then take that pathogen back to the wild herd. “We have spent many years and sportsmen’s dollars to restore and transplant wild sheep into available habitat in Montana,” says FWP’s Hagengruber. “We’ve had recent restorations in the Belts and the Breaks, and disease is always a big concern, and so is the ability of this hybrid ewe to breed with either domestic or wild sheep. So we take the possibility that there may be a hybrid domestic/wild sheep running around central Montana very seriously.” Anyone who sees a lone sheep with a red ear tag in central Montana is urged to call FWP’s Region 4 office at 406-454-5840. ## Author Andrew McKean is *Outdoor Life’s* hunting and conservation editor, drilling into issues that affect wildlife, wild lands, and the people who care about them. He’s also OL’s optics editor, helping readers to make informed buying decisions. He lives outside Glasgow, Montana, where he hunts every day and season he can. ### Author social links [LinkedIn]() [Twitter]() [Instagram]()