THE BIG IDEA

Why you can’t clone a big sheep

Arthur Schubarth, 81, was sentenced to six months in prison and fined $20k for cloning a big sheep. 

Why’d he want this sheep? Not for a friend, unfortunately — but because hunting sheep for sport is a surprisingly big business. 

For big game hunters…

… ram hunting is a serious prize. 

As of 2017, there were ~200k wild sheep in North America, down from the millions that roamed before humans showed up, pushed them out of their natural habitats, and killed them with diseases from domesticated sheep, per The New York Times.  

Conservation efforts include transplanting sheep, but also limiting hunting opportunities, meaning permits — which, in turn, fund conservation efforts — are expensive. 

Hunters can pay $100k+, including tags and guides — and it’s hard, with hunts lasting several days, even weeks, in rough terrain. 

Schubarth… 

… sought to sell his big sheep to game ranches. 

He sent his son to Kyrgyzstan to hunt Marco Polo argali sheep, which can weigh up to 300 pounds. His son smuggled undeclared sheep parts home in his luggage, per Ars Technica. 

Schubarth sent the tissue to a lab and paid for cloned embryos, which he implanted into ewes. In 2017, a sheep he nicknamed “Montana Mountain King” was born. 

He attempted to breed that sheep with other ewes — and sold its semen to other ranchers — to create a bigger, more expensive sheep, and falsified documents to move his hybrid sheep around. 

But you can’t just Frankenstein yourself big sheep, because:

• Marco Polo argali sheep are a protected species.
• They’re banned in Montana to protect native sheep from disease and hybridization — not great for the very conservation efforts other sheep hunters fund. 

The government has since confiscated Montana Mountain King and slaughtered some of the other resulting animals, donating the meat to local families in need.
 

You may be wondering: If I can’t clone a big sheep, how is Colossal, the de-extinction startup, trying to clone a woolly mammoth? Well, the laws have yet to catch up to the tech. 

🔗

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• Woulda, coulda, now you shoulda: One entrepreneur looks back on a decade of business-building successes and picks out five things she’d do if she were starting all over again today. 

DATA POINT

There’s good news and not-so-good news. The good news is that if you want to keep your employees happy, there’s a really obvious way to do it: 81% of employees who feel highly appreciated at work report high job satisfaction, compared to 7% who feel unappreciated or neutral, according to survey data from Canva. 

And 56% of employees report feeling appreciated or very appreciated at work, so job satisfaction is looking up.

That not-so-good news we mentioned? Women are less likely (51%) to feel appreciated or highly appreciated than men (63%) and more likely to feel unappreciated or neutral (28%) than their male counterparts (16%). 

Oh, and the appreciation gets a little stuck when it flows downstream: More employees at VP level or above feel appreciated or highly appreciated (74%) compared to those in director-level roles (62%) or below (53%).

AROUND THE WEB

📕  On this day: In 1895, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, which originally appeared as a newspaper serial, was published as a novel.

🎻  That’s interesting: Listen to a recently discovered Mozart composition.

🏀  That’s cool: We’re not sure why you’d want to see satellite imagery of all 59k+ outdoor basketball courts in the US, but you can, thanks to The Pudding.

🤣  Haha: Just a totally normal blog about how to monetize content.

😍  Aww: Fun facts about possums. 

HOT TAKES

Yesterday, we asked which option you’d choose as your final form from a burgeoning death care industry.

Returning to nature seemed to strike a chord: Most (30%) were tempted by returning as a tree, while 28% chose soil and 15% picked a coral reef. 

Meanwhile, some readers had some lower-budget ideas: “Toss me in a wood chipper and scatter me in nature. Let the forest take care of the rest!”

SHOWER THOUGHT

Wikipedia built the biggest modern information hub using nothing but nerds’ need to correct each other.  SOURCE

Today’s email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Sara Friedman.
Editing by: Ben “How dare ewe” Berkley.

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