The Montana Mountain King and a conspiracy to clone

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She was every student's favorite teacher.

She would joke around with us, more like a friend than a teacher.

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She was brainwashing us from the start.

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This podcast was produced on the lands of the Wabakal and Gadigal people.

G'day, this is if you're listening.

Matt Bevan here.

A few weeks ago, I made a call out to my ABC colleagues in the outro of one of our episodes, asking them to contact us with their best side quests and outlandish stories.

And it is good to know that I have colleagues who listen right to the very end of our episodes, because the folks at ABC Science got in touch with a story that definitely fits this brief.

Last year, environment reporter Peter de Kreife stumbled on the case of 81-year-old rancher Arthur Jack Shubath, who was sentenced to six months in jail for a truly bizarre crime.

He orchestrated an elaborate multi-country conspiracy to smuggle the tissue of a rare bighorn sheep into the US and clone it.

This story actually inspired the new series of ABC's Science Fiction podcast.

It's called Artificial Evolution.

Peter is also the host of this series and it's all about cloning and genetic technology from Dolly the Sheep to Barbara Streisand's clones of her pet dog and the lab trying to bring back the Tasmanian tiger.

I am fascinated by all of those stories, but I think most fascinated by this guy who's been thrown in the clanger for smuggling the DNA of a bighorn sheep.

G'day, Peter.

G'day.

I have a million questions.

I want to talk about the ethics of cloning and that kind of thing, and I want to ask you questions about that, but we'll save that for later on in the episode.

So let's start by you telling me about this guy with the delightful name of Jack Schubart.

Yeah, so Jack is an elderly rancher.

He's from a rural town called Vaughan.

That's in Montana, so in the United States.

So think, you know, Yellowstone, big open plains, not a lot of people.

So for many years, he and his family ran like a 200-acre ranch in Vaughan, like an alternative livestock ranch.

They bought, sold, bred animals, mountain sheep, mountain goats.

They're not into that mainstream livestock.

No, Texas longhorns, none of that.

And so the reason they're doing this is they're selling animals to this thing called game ranches.

So that's where people go and hunt and shoot animals on shooting reserves that other people like own.

And so he's been living there doing lots of ranching, lots of farming.

And a lot of people, you know, want to hunt sheep with really big horns because, you know, that's a great trophy.

How does he get wrapped up in a conspiracy to clone?

So I think a lot of this is just sort of embedded in his passion actually for making making the ultimate hunting sheep.

So it all starts in 2013.

You know, he's got this idea of cross-breeding different species of sheep to make bigger animals, which are going to fetch, you know, bigger prices.

They'll grow bigger horns.

People want that.

So he's worked out a scheme with a number of people.

You know, from court documents, we can kind of see there's five other people involved, although they've never sort of been revealed as of yet.

I guess that part of that investigation is ongoing.

And so someone goes over to Kyrgyzstan.

They get tissue from an animal called a Marco polo sheep, which is a subspecies of a sheep, which is called Nagali sheep, which is basically the biggest sheep you could ever imagine, just horns out.

the side of its head as big as a person, like a small person.

And the idea was to smuggle some of that tissue back into the United States from one of these animals.

That's kind of where it all began.

Was there a reason why they couldn't just bring one of the sheep into the United States?

Why they had to bring them in in a test tube?

There's certain international laws and even federal laws within the states around importing sheep into the US.

You can go through a bit of a process of maybe bringing it back a trophy.

You can actually hunt the animals in countries like Kyrgyzstan and then go through a bit of a process to bring back probably a head with horns.

You have to bring it back dead.

Yeah, yeah.

As opposed to maybe bringing in something in an esky, you know, live genetic material for

cloning purposes.

So kind of ran up against

several laws.

Okay, so he's particularly keen on this enormous, I suppose we could describe it as an absolute unit of a sheep.

How big is this sheep?

Yeah, so they get to about 130 kilos on average, a male.

They're quite curly, the horns.

So if you measure them out, it might be like sort of six foot or more across.

But generally speaking, from tip to tip, it could be about five feet.

I mean, I don't know a lot about hunting, but my understanding was that, you know, it's about getting out and being one with nature and being one with, you know, creation and hunting these tremendous wild beasts.

And it just seems to me that taking the organic material from a

Kyrgyzstani giant sheep, bringing it into the United States and, you know, chucking it in a blender with any other big sheep DNA that you can find and then making an animal that has never existed on this planet before and then releasing that animal into a part of the world that its parents are not from and then going, all right, now, you know, now here's the real challenge.

Can you figure out how to kill this animal?

Doesn't seem like it goes along the you know, with the ethos that I am told that hunting is all about.

So it seems like something very strange is going on here.

But go on.

What are they bringing in?

What is it that they're actually bringing?

They're bringing in a bit of it, right?

You know, all right, so they don't.

You don't need a whole lot, you don't need a whole animal,

you just need to bring in a piece.

They're not bringing in reproductive material, you're saying that they're bringing in a like a like a steak, you know, like a chop.

Chop in, yeah, or maybe like maybe like bone.

Bone can be a good source for uh cells.

So, you want to you want to have something that will travel.

And what's happened is they've sent some of these cells to a lab in the States.

We're not sure what the lab is, that hasn't been made public, but a lab that creates clone embryos.

So they take that genetic material, they put it into an empty sheep egg, and then that egg can be put into a surrogate mum.

And because sheep are, these sheep species are quite closely related, it doesn't have to be a Marco Polo sheep.

You can put that into maybe a regular domesticated sheep or another wild mountain sheep, and that will give birth to what is genetically a pure Marco Polo agali sheep.

And so that's what they do.

They send it off to a lab.

One of the biggest labs in the US is called Viagen.

They've confirmed it's not them.

They weren't involved in this.

But they did say, you know, anyone who did do it could see what this would have been.

They shouldn't have the wool over their eyes in terms of it being a foreign sheep that they've been asked to clone the embryos of by a rancher in Montana.

Okay.

And so in 2016, they get back 165 embryos.

They implant some of those into some ewes, and one sheep out of that is successfully born, the genetically pure Marco Polo Egali sheep, who Jack calls Montana Mountain King.

The Montana Mountain King.

MMK.

MMK.

Okay.

Can you explain to me, you know, you just mentioned that there's a cloning company called Viogen.

That implies that there is a cloning industry.

I think most of us would have heard of Dolly the Sheep.

That was, I want to say, roughly the 90s.

So we've had cloning technology since the 90s, but I think it's probably dropped out of the public imagination a lot since then.

What are we talking about when it comes to a cloning industry?

What can we clone?

How much does it cost?

And what are the laws around it?

Yeah, no, it's interesting.

I think there was probably a 10-year,

five-year span there where people were losing their minds because Dolly was sort of the first mammal that was cloned from adult cells.

So that's not, you know, just splitting frog embryos at the beginning to create, you know, like identical twins.

You know, identical twins, identical twins are just clones.

So we were like, oh no, what are we going to do?

We're going to make humans.

Are we going to clone humans?

So there's this flurry of law changes.

So people are like, all right, we're going to go clone humans.

But then you get pigs not long after, cows, dogs, cats, horses.

Every couple of years, a new kind of animal has been cloned.

And I guess in the last sort of 10 years, we've finally sort of seen it move into this commercial space.

It's not a huge industry, but it does exist because it's got very niche reasons you'd want to clone an animal.

And it's quite expensive.

So it kind of ranges between $50,000 to $10,000.

So for $100,000 for something like a cat or a dog or a horse.

Cows are cheap.

You can clone a cow in Australia for $15,000 or you can get a horse cloned outside of Sydney for about $50,000.

I have many questions.

Is it only legal to clone cows and horses in Australia, or could we theoretically clone more, but there's just no industry for it?

Yeah, you could clone any animal, really.

There's no laws on it.

You're not allowed to clone humans.

That's our hard and fast.

There's some limited sort of research into like cloning human embryos for medical research.

There hasn't been

heaps of that, though, but you can kind of do it.

So cloning horses and why cloning horses happening in Australia is because of the polo sport.

People seem to like cloning horses.

Polo?

Yeah.

I assumed it was racehorses.

I don't know why I didn't.

Yeah, no, no artificial insemination is allowed in the racing industry.

So pretty much every other horse sport, you can do it in like Olympic sports like show jumping, polo.

Polo is massive.

Argentina just really went full bore cloning horses for polo.

It's really big there, the US.

And so that's how it sort of started in Australia in the last eight years.

Okay.

Am I right in saying that we've got bits of Farlap around that we could you know if you're not in Australia Farlap is this legendary racehorse it's our secretariat.

Can you clone Farlap?

Could we?

Look I don't think we're going to see any robberies of museums of Australia and New Zealand for the of the hearts and bones of Farlap.

The Farlap heist.

Yeah I think the genetic material is a bit too far gone for cloning with current technology.

But I've seen Jurassic Park.

All you need is the mosquito frozen in amber.

Okay, so they've created the Montana Mountain King sheep.

How does anybody find out about this illegal clone sheep?

Yeah, so they were able to clone the sheep and start hybridizing it with other sheep.

So this is over like about a decade sort of span.

And so they were using the semen of MMK to artificially impregnate ewes of other species.

And I should say agali are actually banned in Montana.

They're not allowed to be there.

So semen from MMK is just going all around Montana into other states, particularly Texas, to other game ranches.

So they're selling semen to people to make their own sheep.

And then also Jack was kind of experimenting with mixing them with Rocky Mountain bighorn.

So he's paid a hunter $400 for fresh bighorn testicles to take semen from bighorn testicles and then mix that with sheep from the NMK's line to create an even bigger, crazier sheep.

And somewhere along the line, because you're actually forging vet inspection certificates, claiming everything's legal sheep, claiming they're legal to be there on Montana.

So this is where it kind of starts to come undone after all these years, because someone along the line realizes there's very much not a legal sheep.

I'm just imagining, you know, someone walking past, you know, a field where you have a herd of sheep there and there's, you know, 200 normal sheep and then there's just this tank.

This massive beast of a sheep with six-foot horns chewing there in the grass, trying to look nonchalant and trying to blend in, but failing miserably.

So they obviously got wind that there was something amiss in Montana.

How did they catch him?

Yeah, we just don't know.

So by the time it actually ends up in court documents for the first time, he'd already worked out a plea deal with the prosecutors.

What exactly was he being charged with?

He was being charged with wildlife trafficking.

Yeah, so conspiracy to traffic wildlife and just guilty of wildlife trafficking.

So that's from this moving around between different states and this writing up of fraudulent papers to enable that conspiracy.

So he faced up to about five years in prison, $250,000 fine, was sentenced to six months in prison and a $20,000 fine in the end.

You'll notice that I didn't say illegal cloning or anything because cloning is perfectly legal.

It was just that this particular species wasn't allowed in that state.

And that's sort of where the actual charges stem from.

And funnily enough, in the US, you know, they actually never really wrote a federal law about banning human cloning.

We were talking about human cloning before.

It's not actually illegal to federally clone a human in the US.

It is in a couple of states, but it's not really illegal.

And the FDA might not approve aspects of it, I guess.

What I want to ask you is, it's extremely unusual, I think, in science for us to be able to do something and then decide maybe it's probably best that we don't do that.

Usually we just do it.

I mean, we're currently seeing the situation with AI where, you know, it seems like absolutely there is nothing that anyone can say about the potential downsides to AI that will stop anybody from investing billions of dollars in it and trying to make it happen as quickly as possible.

It's kind of an extraordinary thing that we don't have human cloning, despite the fact that it is, obviously, not all that difficult to clone a human if you've managed to clone all these other animals is it just we caught a very unusual case of morals and ethics or what's going on here yeah look it has there are technical challenges still in cloning a human i think we only managed to do monkeys about 2017 2018 which which does i think really make it possible to clone humans but I guess some of it's like, what's the point of it?

You know, if a reclusive billionaire wants to clone themselves, it's not like they're going to have their memory.

It's like, oh, congratulations,

you've cloned a brand new twin that's 80 years younger than yourself.

Well, I mean, but there's all the thing about organ harvesting.

Just literally a couple of weeks ago, we heard Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping on a hot mic talking about how you can, you know, live for a very, very long period of time by using organ transplants.

Yeah, my brain did go in that moment to is there like a clone farm of Putin's and Xi Jinping's?

Just down in the, down in the basement of the Kremlin, there is like a, I mean, either they'd all be on ice, you know, there's just

like a gallery of frozen Vladimir Putins, or there's like a weird sort of Vladimir Putin daycare sort of a situation where they're raising like a like a whole little suite,

a little family of little Vladimirs, little little lads.

Yeah.

So the ethical lines at the moment, you know, people are really working on trying to create things like organoids, you know, maybe creating organs from your own cells, you know, growing them in a dish as opposed to an entire human to steal their organs from.

Yeah, fascinating.

Okay, so you mentioned that pets are cloned.

Tell me about Barbara Streisand and what her deal is with cloning.

Yeah, so she wanted to get clones of her dogs.

And this is the thing we're coming back to.

Why do people get clones?

People just really love a particular animal sometimes.

It's this emotional attachment.

And so you had this period where some of these pet cloning companies, like the one in South Korea and the US they were kind of auctioning off spots Barbara Goner got in when it was really really expensive and she ended up with these clones of her dogs but I don't think she was ended up being too happy with the outcome because you're making twins they're not the same they're not the same dog they're not necessarily going to have all the same ways of being in life they might have a different personality i think that there's a guy who clones who's cloning nine horses of the same horse in the sydney place we were talking about earlier and the blaze which is that sort of stripe down the head of the horse, the blaze on each of the clones is completely different.

And so they're all this sort of nice, you know, light chestnutty brown colour, the body of the horses.

But the blazes are all different.

Like one's a little star, one's a big blaze, one's a nice stripe.

I feel like, for example, with horses, if you were to clone nine horses and then train them in nine different ways, then that would potentially be a way of conducting a semi-scientific study on what the best way to train a horse is what the best way to get the most out of a horse is

you're laughing as though that's exactly what this guy's about to do is that what this guy's about to do oh kind of i mean he's obviously not he wants these horses for polo but not all of them will necessarily

you forgot about the polo my friend i forgot about the polo yeah not all of them will necessarily make good polo horses there might just be things slightly different about their personalities because a polo horse has got to be really calm able to go from zero to a hundred move around take bumps get back onto its line after taking a bump so it takes a very specific kind of horse in body and mind

and whether or not all of these clones will have what it takes they'll see maybe none of them will be able to play polo but you know from a from a lab perspective this is why people want to clone mice or why the cloning of monkeys is is happening in uh china because it's this idea of having the genetically same animal to run tests on, animal experimentation.

Whole different ethical considerations there.

What ended up happening to MMK, our old friend?

Is he, you know, still roaming the hills of Mountana?

I thought of it like he was sort of in witness protection almost.

So he went into a wildlife rehab center for several years in Oregon, and the people there called him Dodge.

And then about a month ago, it was revealed he's had another name changed to Tillich, which means dream, and is in another home at the Rosamond Gifford Zoo, Syracuse, New York.

And he lives in a bachelor group with this other species, which is called a Tajik Makor.

Three or four of those dudes, which are basically a goat with corkscrew horns, because back in the home country, in the old country, MMK's sheeple

live in bachelor groups.

Yeah.

So they've kind of made him a surrogate, you know, little bro herd to spend out his days.

So because he's from Kyrgyzstan and they're from Tajikistan.

Oh, that's so nice.

What a beautiful ending for MMK/slash/Dodge/slash Tilak.

I love that.

What an excellent story.

Thank you so much for bringing it to us.

So, we're taking a few weeks off from new full scripted Thursday episodes.

We will still be back with a brand new Tuesday episode next Tuesday.

But we've been digging through the archives for relevant episodes that feel extra relevant right now.

So on Thursday we're going to be replaying an episode that is all about semaglutide, a drug you probably know by its brand name, Ozempic.

It's only become more popular since this episode first aired.

I'm sure you know people who take it.

You might even take it yourself.

It's an interesting story though about the century-long search for weight loss drugs and an examination into whether that search is really over or is this too good to be true.

We're also putting together a QA episode for when we're back.

If you have a question about the show, a topic we've covered, or a topic you think we should cover, record it as an audio message and email it to ifyourelistening at abc.net.au.

You can also send it to us as text, but if we can play it, that's even better.