An 80-year-old man in Montana pleaded guilty Tuesday to two felony wildlife crimes involving his plan to let paying customers hunt sheep on private ranches. But these weren’t just any old sheep. They were “massive hybrid sheep” created by illegally importing animal parts from central Asia, cloning t...
Wait, how did he clone the sheep? That's a key part that seems to be glossed over.
The man cloned an animal and made a hybrid super sheep and the article just barely mentions the cloning!
It's like if a guy got stopped while riding a motorcycle with a shark over his shoulder, and a news article only mentioned the shark in passing. Explain the shark, please!
He sent them into a lab to get cloned and then implanted the embryos into ewes. He got one pure argali male sheep out of that and then artificially inseminated other ewes with the argali sheep to produce hybrids.
Someone is going to go over this law with a fine toothed comb.
Importing endangered animals? Clearly illegal.
Killing endangered animals and bringing in parts? Clearly illegal.
Bringing in endangered animal DNA and making more endangered animals? 🤔
I dunno... I'm not well versed enough in law, ecology, or animal husbandry. It really feels like this is a new area.
Let's take the hunting angle out of it. Say I brought in Siberian Tiger DNA for the express purpose of creating and breeding tigers and hybrids in captivity... wouldn't that just be species preservation?
Yeah, I can't see why they wouldn't be able to do this. As long as you're not abusing and torturing them I don't see a problem. Just make sure the animals don't escape into the wild.