A Montana man pleaded guilty to two felony wildlife crimes – a conspiracy to violate the Lacey Act and substantively violating the Lacey Act – as part of an almost decade-long effort to create giant sheep hybrids in the United States with an aim to sell the species to captive hunting facilities.
We’re probably not talking about the cute hornless domesticated puffballs you’re probably picturing when you hear “sheep,” but something more like a bighorn sheep, but honestly even a domesticated ram can be pretty intimidating.
And really, canned hunting like this aside, why not hunt sheep? They’re not all that different from a deer, probably the most popular type of game animals at least in the US if not the world. They’re both ruminate ungulates with horns growing out of their head, depending on the species they can be in roughly the same weight class as deer or even larger, and sheep can be pretty well-adapted to some environments that deer aren’t as well-suited for, so they can present more of or at least a different kind of challenge to hunters (which is part of the appeal for some hunters)
I don’t support what this guy did or the type of hunting industry he’s involved in, but hunting wild sheep isn’t exactly a novel concept, and is fairly popular in areas where wild sheep are present.
I know in the US it’s something a lot of hunters would like to do if they had the opportunity, but those opportunities are limited (and rightfully so) for conservation reasons, most states have a lottery system to get a bighorn tag because the demand for the tags well exceeds the amount of hunting the sheep population can actually sustain, meaning you often have a less than 1% chance of getting a tag the first time you apply for one, so I guess I understand the appeal of this kind of hunting as a way around the tag system for wild sheep, even if I don’t really agree with it.