No hybrid bighorns

I think if this would have happened in Texas, Oklahoma or Missouri no one would have blinked an eye.

I question the expense spent by the federal government for this kind of witchhunt.

I do agree that hybrid wildsheep should not be raised in states with wildsheep. With domestic sheep being a huge part of the west since the 1800's I kind of even have to question that. There are several cases of bighorns rams coming off the mountain to breed domestic ewes.

Mostly I see this as someone that was out of line, getting smacked down by the government excessivly.
 
Fairmont Hot Springs hotel near Butte used to have mouflon and fallow deer in their enclosure. The state showed up with a veterinarian and castrated all the mouflon and fallow deer males. It's probably been 15 years since that happened if not more. I am sure they are all dead. They did it without a warrant, without warning and it just happened.
 
I’m surprised by some of the flippant responses here on this thread.

A guy was illegally risking the local ecosystem by introducing non-native species for his personal profit. That’s a bad thing. Not to mention the larger overall problem surrounding game farms in general.

The fact that somehow Fauci/COVID-19 gets brought up in these totally unrelated threads is especially comical.
 
If you hunt game farms I guess it’s possibly a good thing.

I dealt with game farms for 24 years, between stealing game out of the wild, red deer (and other exotic species) escaping, disease issues, etc hard for me to come up with anything positive about them.
 
He was raising live stock, his mistake was improperly transporting them. I do find it funny, why do this in Montana, not your market state and most other states would not DNA test his sheep for transportation classification, to get him on documentation. All the horned sheep are hienz 57 these days, so I think state got a little over zealous . With that said he was an idiot for doing it in MT. He had stronger protections in numerous other states.

I have more sympathy for guy raising live stock in HF than guys free ranging sheep in the high country, because his sheep are far less likely to interact with wild sheep.
 
Personally I am very happy to see stuff like this shut down. There are already enough issues facing wild sheep in the world today.
 
If a bighorn and a marco polo are in fact different species I believe their offspring would be infertile.
 
I learned something new. Thanks.

I thought hybrid meant any two different species as parents and would be infertile, like horses and donkeys.
Apparently not.

Taxonomy
The genus Ovis ( Figure 1 ) comprises several wild and domesticated species ( Maijala 1997 ). This taxonomical usage is controversial since all of these so-called “species” can interbreed
 
I learned something new. Thanks.

I thought hybrid meant any two different species as parents and would be infertile, like horses and donkeys.
Apparently not.

Taxonomy
The genus Ovis ( Figure 1 ) comprises several wild and domesticated species ( Maijala 1997 ). This taxonomical usage is controversial since all of these so-called “species” can interbreed
Ah, gotcha. Most folks believe hybrids are infertile because their experience is limited to the well-known ones like ligers, mules, etc.

But polar/grizz hybrids exist, as do coywolves, and they’re all fertile.

Nature is crazy.
 
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