An 81-year-old Montana man has been sentenced to six months in prison for illegally using tissue and testicles from large sheep hunted in Central Asia and the U.S. to create a hybrid sheep for trophy hunting.

U.S. District Court Judge Brian Morris said he struggled to come up with a sentence for Arthur “Jack” Schubarth of Vaughn, Montana, because not only was his crime so unique and bizarre, but he’s also an 81 year old man with no criminal history. However, in the end he had to punish him in order to deter others from trying to “change the genetic makeup of the creatures” on earth.

The judge also fined Schubarth $20,000 and ordered him to make a $4,000 payment to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Schubarth will be allowed to self-report to a Bureau of Prisons medical facility, so that’s nice.

Schubarth pleaded guilty to charges that he and five other people conspired to use tissue from a Marco Polo sheep illegally brought into the U.S. to clone that animal and then use the clone and its descendants to create a larger, hybrid species of sheep that would be more valuable for captive hunting operations. Which actually sounds f***ing awesome on some level, and very impressive that they would even know how to do something like that.

Marco Polo sheep are the largest in the world, can weigh 300 pounds (136 kilograms) and have curled horns up to 5 feet (1.5 meters) long.

Schubarth sold semen along with hybrid sheep to three people in Texas, while a Minnesota resident brought 74 sheep to Schubarth’s ranch for them to be inseminated at various times during the conspiracy. Schubarth sold one direct offspring  for $10,000 and other sheep with lesser genetics for smaller amounts.

I’m not sure anyone reading this even considered the idea of amateur sheep cloning for profit, let alone whether doing such a thing would be illegal or not. I guess it’s not so much the cloning/breeding part (although, it’s also that) so much as releasing these animals out into the wild, where anything could happen. They could even end up replacing other native species entirely?

In fact according to this article that’s exactly why it’s illegal:

Male argali sheep can top 300 pounds with horns up to 5 feet long, according to officials, making them prized among some hunters. They are protected under international convention as a threatened species and outlawed for import into Montana to protect native sheep from disease and hybridization.

Fascinating. Well, at least he didn’t sh@g it, I suppose. He was just trying to create the ultimate trophy sheep, which is probably a bit too close to the movie Predator for our liking anyway. Imagine – eventually he’d have tried to cross bred one of these monster sheep with a human to make even more shocking prey animal for rich people to hunt. Can’t be having that, can we?

For the tiny lamb that was found in the back of a car alongside £10,000 worth of drugs, click HERE.