Welcome to Midnight Dispatches. Tonight, the Frankenram. A cloned hybrid sheep, loose in the mountains of Montana. Nobody knows where it is. Nobody knows if it is alive.
In early September, a sheep escaped from a breeding ranch in Montana. Not an ordinary sheep. A hybrid, part Montana bighorn, part Marco Polo Argali, a wild sheep from Kyrgyzstan. Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks reported it missing on September eighteenth. They believe it actually got out around September second. It is a ewe, about a hundred and twenty pounds, mostly white, with a red ear tag. Two months later, nobody has seen it.
The ewe was made, not born in the usual way. In twenty seventeen, a rancher named Jack Schubarth cloned genetic material from a Marco Polo Argali in Kyrgyzstan and produced a purebred lamb. He called it the Montana Mountain King. Over the next several years he bred hybrids from it. The escaped ewe is mainly bighorn, about sixty-two percent, three or four crosses down from the original. A sheep, assembled in a backyard lab.
Schubarth was found guilty in twenty twenty-four of violating the Lacey Act, the conservation law against illegal wildlife trade. When game wardens came to his ranch in mid-September about the missing ewe, he said, oh yeah, I meant to tell you. He says it probably slipped through a damaged fence or an open gate, and if so, it is probably dead by now, taken by coyotes. Officials say it may have been sold to an out-of-state game farm instead. Two stories. No ewe.
Here is why Montana cares. Bighorn sheep catch pneumonia from domestic sheep, and when they catch it, it is nearly always fatal. It kills the lambs first, then works through the herd. There is no cure. Since nineteen seventy-nine, Montana's wild herds have had twenty-two pneumonia outbreaks. One wiped out an entire herd. Schubarth's ranch sits thirty miles from a sizeable wild band at Cascade, twenty to twenty-five miles from the Birdtail Hills, sixty or seventy miles from the Rocky Mountain Front, home to Montana's most treasured herd. All it takes is one meeting.
The original clone has a different ending. Tilek, the Marco Polo sheep Schubarth cloned in twenty seventeen, was taken from him in twenty twenty-one. He spent forty-one months in rehabilitative care in Oregon. In twenty twenty-five, the Rosamond Gifford Zoo took him in, and today he lives there with a group of markhor goats. Safe. Watched. Fed. The hybrid he helped create is still out there, or dead, or sold. Nobody knows which. Not the zombie apocalypse. Just a cloned sheep, loose in the mountains, carrying a disease that can end a herd. That is enough.
Thanks for listening. If you are in Montana and you see a white ewe with a red ear tag, Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks would like to hear from you. They say nothing good happens after midnight. Tune in tomorrow night and let's find out together.
Midnight Dispatches: strange but true stories, told after midnight.