Frankenstein's Sheep

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The way the federal agents swarmed Jack Schubarth's ranch in Montana on a late-spring day in 2021, it seemed they could have been taking down an anti-government militia. It was a dry morning when Schubarth, an 82-year-old whose family owns a small-town pet store, first heard the helicopter buzzing overhead. Then came around 60 federal agents and state officers, racing out of a fleet of black vans. They searched the property, found 15 guns, and piled them on Schubarth's bed. But the guns weren't what they came for: The agents were searching for his sheep.

Specifically, they were there for a Marco Polo argali he called the "Montana Mountain King," or MMK for short. At the time of the raid, MMK was on his way to becoming the biggest horned ram in America. His muscular legs were capable of carrying him at speeds over 30 mph in mountain terrain; his spiraling horns were predicted to grow to the length of a piano. The agents eventually found MMK in a sprawling pasture, where they fired tranquilizer darts at him until he passed out, falling onto a fence. The Feds loaded him into a trailer. They wouldn't tell Schubarth where they were taking him. He was stunned.

Argali are native to Central Asia and are favorites of elite big-game hunters: Donald Trump Jr. nabbed one in Mongolia in 2019. But MMK had never been to Asia. He was a clone -- made by Schubarth himself, right there on the ranch, the only animal of his kind in America. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the sheep had no business being in the state or the country at all.

In September 2024, Schubarth pleaded guilty to smuggling in the genetic material that he used to make MMK and later selling the cloned sheep's offspring to other ranchers; he was sentenced to six months in a federal prison for violating the Lacey Act, which prohibits trafficking illegally sourced wildlife. Argali, it turns out, were also specifically prohibited in the State of Montana, meaning he'd broken state law, too. "A single escaped specimen from Mr. Schubarth's ranch could have not only altered the genetic makeup of bighorns in Montana, but it could have resulted in a large-scale die-off," the federal prosecutor said in court. The cloning itself wasn't technically illegal, but it didn't win Schubarth any favors. By the time he was charged, MMK's genetics had spread all over the U.S. His own farm was rife with MMK offspring too; he had spent years interbreeding the sheep with other wild species.

Schubarth maintains he distributed MMK's semen to improve the health of his own flock and all American sheep. In loftier moments, he said he'd hoped that by interbreeding his sheep -- which were prone to pneumonia -- with a hardier species like the argali, he'd make them immune to disease altogether. Making MMK was his greatest accomplishment, a culmination of everything he'd taught himself about husbandry during his decades as a rancher. "I was in a meeting with the Feds, and they said that they were amazed that a person without a formal education could achieve what he has done," says Ellen Schubarth, his wife of 64 years.

Schubarth, whose formal education ended with a high-school diploma, is one of only five people or teams in the world ever to successfully clone an endangered species. If he'd played by the rules, MMK could have been celebrated as a scientific achievement. And, in fact, other younger, better-funded, and savvier players in the novelty-animal space are using cloning and gene editing to dream up ever-wilder species, enriching themselves in the process. These founders are creating everything from glow-in-the-dark bunnies to dire wolves; one is on her way to making a unicorn. Unlike Schubarth, who is currently on federal probation, they understand how to make a brand-new animal without risking prison time. Schubarth is in massive debt from legal fees and will likely have to work on the ranch for the rest of his life. He now considers MMK one of his biggest mistakes. "I wanted to make a quality animal, and I succeeded," he tells me. "But I'm sorry I did it."

Schubarth is someone who likes sheep more than he does most people. "These sheep are my confirmed socialism family. They depend on me for everything, food, protection and sex," he posted on Facebook in October 2020. "Kind of like what the democrats are pushing for with their agenda. People shouldn't live like sheep." Since the 1970s, Schubarth's people have lived together on a 200-acre ranch outside the small city of Great Falls, Montana. Surrounded by farmland and prairie, the Schubarth Ranch is one of the only places in this stretch of the state with hundreds of trees, which his family planted. His daughter and two sons have homes down the road, where they live with their children.

Schubarth works outside seven days a week, most often in a Carhartt hoodie and a pair of well-worn blue jeans. His favorite time of the year is spring, when animals are born. "I don't go to church, but I believe in nature," he says. "Frankly, that's why I enjoy birthing: It's the renewal of nature. At my age, I'll get a pink slip sooner or later." His ranch is home to hundreds of animals. In addition to the sheep, there are 70 horses, 19 elk, an English bulldog named Booger and her four puppies, 12 tropical fish, barn cats, and a quantity of pigeons so large that Schubarth is embarrassed to give me a figure. He later estimates it is around 400. "It costs me four buckets of wheat a day to feed 'em," he says. "Waste of money." Ellen runs the pet store in town, Jack's Pet Center, where the Schubarths sell some of the fish and puppies the family breeds. The shop also keeps a small troop of capuchin monkeys.

In recent years, the ranch's main source of income has been the sale of sheep and elk. Schubarth sells to other breeders as well as to a hunting ranch, where people pay to shoot his animals or their descendants. He has complicated feelings about that and more than once has turned down big money, refusing to sell a favorite ram to a hunting operation and holding out for a breeder instead. But almost all of his rams and their offspring end up on the walls of a trophy room one way or another. Killing, or, in industry lingo, "harvesting," is the foundation of the exotic-sheep economy.

Texas is a mecca for fenced hunts. The Exotic Wildlife Association, a Texas-based group "dedicated to the preservation of exotic hoofstock through private ownership," says that the industry brings in an estimated $2 billion in revenue annually. Hunting a wild ram costs at least $2,500, but ultrarare species fetch far more. One Texas ranch charges $20,000 for the privilege to shoot a Transcaspian urial, a wild sheep native to Central Asia; shooting a zebra on the property costs only $7,750. Many hunting ranches offer the chance to shoot deer cloned and selectively bred to have absurdly large antlers, florid and baroque, like chandeliers at Versailles. The bodies holding up these racks look so small that one imagines they might have a hard time walking.

Before MMK, one of the only ways to see or hunt argali was in the wilderness of Central Asia in an inhospitable alpine region where they live on precipitous rock cliffs. The animal's natural predators are wolves and snow leopards; locals sometimes eat its meat. They are all but invisible to hunters except in the frigid winter months. To shoot argali ram in the wilderness requires a ton of permits, a ton of money, and a ton of time -- even more so than an African lion. This means that wilderness sheep hunters tend to be fit and rich, says Steve Presnal, a hunter I connected with on a big-game forum. "You run into these guys at the Safari Club show" -- a convention where hunters can book trips to shoot black rhinos and peruse gear -- "and they probably flew in on their private jet. And all they talk about is sheep. They travel around the world to these remote places to get all the different sheep. They're fanatics." Over the past decade, the hobby has exploded. Which is why cloning is useful. "It's for guys who aren't in that elite group of hunters but want to be in that elite group and not have to go all the way to Kyrgyzstan," says Presnal.

Kyrgyzstan is where Schubarth got the genetic material to clone MMK. By 2012, he was growing frustrated with a problem most ranchers face: His flock of sheep kept catching pneumonia. Schubarth thought that introducing a robust new species like an argali into the mix might help the situation. But he was too old to try to make the trip. So he sent his son. "I thought, What the heck, he might as well try." In the late winter of 2012, his son took a 30-hour flight from Montana to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. From there, it was an almost 20-hour drive to the frozen steppe near the Chinese border.

The trip was unsuccessful, so Schubarth's son tried again a month later in January 2013. In the 40-below weather, he managed to shoot a four-year-old argali ram. Using a small blade, he sliced off a pencil-eraser-size piece of hide from its armpit and put it in a tissue-collection kit furnished by a U.S. livestock-cloning outfit called Trans Ova Genetics. The Iowa-based company and its then-subsidiary, ViaGen, were market leaders in animal cloning in the U.S.; they're known for cloning Barbra Streisand's dog, Argentina's high-performing polo ponies, and the ultramilky dairy cows in demand by big agriculture. On the 30-hour flight back to Montana, Schubarth's son kept the piece of hide cool, but not frozen, between Coca-Cola cans.

After he landed in Montana, the family shipped the hide to Trans Ova in a small plastic container. The company then put it in storage to keep the cells viable. Later, Schubarth says he paid $34,000 for 165 live embryos made using the argali's DNA. Cloning technology in 2025 works largely the way it did in 1996 when Dolly the sheep was created: DNA from the animal is extracted, then inserted into an egg cell from which the nucleus has been removed. The resulting embryo becomes a clone and is implanted in a surrogate mother. Cloning is naturally inefficient, and the success rate for a live birth is low. This is especially true for rare or endangered animals, which use both donor egg cells and surrogate mothers of different species. But Schubarth was determined. In 2016, Trans Ova shipped the cloned embryos to the Schubarth Ranch. In order to improve his odds of a successful birth, Schubarth did something ingenious: He inserted a progesterone device into each of the ewes he was attempting to impregnate, which elongated their gestation windows. It worked. One lamb, MMK, survived.

Schubarth delivered MMK with his bare hands on the straw floor of his barn in 2017. The animal weighed 14 pounds. Over the next few years, Schubarth raised MMK into a formidable 300-pound ovine that liked to pummel a tower of old tires with his four-and-a-half-foot horns. When MMK turned two years old, Schubarth tried to breed him. It turned out to be a challenge: MMK was already so big that every time he mounted a female, she would collapse under his weight. "I knew it wasn't working the very first year," Schubarth says. So he decided to try to collect MMK's semen, which he then used to impregnate his ewes via artificial insemination.

Schubarth had experience with creative sheep breeding. For years, according to court filings, he'd been paying wilderness guides to harvest the testicles of freshly killed native bighorn sheep shot in the Montana outdoors by wealthy hunters. Then he'd extract that wild semen to impregnate his own sheep -- a process the Feds later said was also illegal, even though the ball sacks would otherwise just go in a gut pile. Now, here was MMK -- alive but with an intimidating set of horns. Schubarth realized he'd be wise to sedate the ram. He darted him with ketamine, then inserted a rectal probe, which shocked MMK with an electrical current that caused him to ejaculate.

The process turned out to be so seamless that soon Schubarth attracted customers. Fellow ranchers from all over the U.S. seemed to be convinced of Schubarth's hypothesis that argali sheep would help herd health or at least be especially valuable as trophies. Ranchers showed up from Texas and Ohio with trailers full of contraband black-Hawaiian, Phantom, and Stumberg ewes to get impregnated by MMK. (In an effort to protect the wild bighorn population, Montana regulates the import of non-native sheep. Wild bighorns are extremely valuable to the state: Last year, a tag to shoot one in the wilderness sold at auction for $380,000.) The Texas and Ohio ranchers had to forge vet transport paperwork to get them across state lines, per court documents. Ellen Schubarth says her husband wasn't in it for the money and only ever broke even from the scheme.

These were heady days for the sheep-fanatic community, which was creating hybrid species never before seen in the country -- or anywhere else, for that matter. "I have a dream!" one hunting guide wrote on Facebook. "And that has been to create an exotic ram that looks like a native North American ram. I have rams now with 40 plus inch curls, one and a quarter curls, 12 inch bases, 250 pounds, and tall! This is a dream come true! Praise the Lord!"

Where Schubarth went wrong was smuggling a threatened and internationally protected species into the U.S., then selling it. This made everything he did afterward illegal. But with proper paperwork and institutional backing, other teams cloning endangered and even extinct animals are celebrated as heroes of conservation. The nonprofit Revive & Restore's stated mission is developing biotechnology solutions for rescuing endangered species, which it does partially through cloning. One of its goals is to create a biobank for every species of endangered mammal in the U.S., a sort of frozen Noah's Ark. It's currently working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on this effort.

Ben Novak, a biologist with Revive & Restore, tells me he became aware of Schubarth in 2018 when the rancher's name came up in a conversation with ViaGen employees about an animal the company was working to clone called Przewalski's horse, an endangered equine native to Central Asia. He thought Schubarth was cloning a native Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, not an argali. When he spoke to Schubarth on the phone later that year about his efforts, Novak says, "Schubarth fed me the same lie he gave everybody else. He was honest about how he made the clone; he was just dishonest about what species it was." Still, Novak admits that either way it was an accomplishment: He published a paper this past February in the online journal Animals about the rarity of cloning endangered animals, mentioning his own Przewalski's horse and Schubarth's sheep.

Trans Ova says Schubarth signed statements saying that the tissue sample was lawfully in the United States. The company says it "did not know it was being hired by someone committing federal crimes and believed the criminal's written and signed statements that he had not engaged in illegal activity." It also says it "cooperated fully with the investigation" into Schubarth and was "quickly cleared of any unlawful involvement or culpability." Either way, more illegal clonings may follow. "There are a lot of ranch owners in Texas who have exotic wildlife," says Novak, acquired legally or otherwise. "So, I mean, theoretically there are a lot of opportunities for people to start trying to do this work on their own. Almost anything in science can be biohacked if you're rich enough, which is also unfortunately kind of what the dire wolves prove as well."

In April of this year, a company called Colossal Biosciences announced that it had brought back the dire wolf, which was extinct for more than 10,000 years. This was an incredible feat even if you'd been paying attention to recent developments in animal engineering. Today, humans who want to tinker with evolution have sophisticated and accelerated tools -- not just cloning but also gene editing. Where cloning creates a genetic twin of an existing animal, gene editing via technology like CRISPR changes an animal's DNA sequence, editing specific locations. CRISPR has led to new medical treatments for sickle-cell anemia and other diseases; it can also be used to create animals, often in conjunction with cloning. Gene-edited animals can be innovative, beautiful, and grotesque. Over the past couple of decades, scientists have used the technology to make cats, rabbits, monkeys, and mice glow in the dark for disease research; to create pigs specifically made to be farmed for their organs; to develop extra-muscly (and thus meaty) rabbits, sheep, pigs, and cattle; and to produce a drove of miniaturized pigs meant for drug-testing. (These ended up being so cute their creators sold them as pets.)

All of these biomedical advancements have opened the door for a well-funded start-up to get rich on gene-edited animals to the tune of $10 billion. That was Colossal's valuation earlier this year when it debuted three white dire-wolf pups with a Time magazine cover, a New Yorker article, and a ten-hour AI-generated "music video" of the animals howling. The company used a combination of CRISPR, ancient DNA, and cloning to make the wolves. The first funding round was led by Thomas Tull, a film producer and investor in defense companies plus, incidentally, Jurassic World.

Colossal's stated goal is to make animal extinction a thing of the past. The company was founded by George Church, the Harvard professor behind eGenesis, a company developing human-compatible pig organs, as well as other gene-editing start-ups. His co-founder, and the company's CEO, is Ben Lamm, a 43-year-old former software developer and prolific founder whose past companies have focused on consumer gaming and AI for space and defense. When I meet with Lamm via Zoom, he wears an enormous touchscreen watch and a wizard-graphic T-shirt, which it turns out he designed. "I have a young son, first child," he tells me. "The idea that we can do this and hopefully have a really big impact on conservation and ecosystems, while creating technology that hopefully helps human health care, and then also getting people like my son excited about science in a time where not everyone's as excited about science as I hope they should be? I'm pretty stoked. But can we talk dodoes?"

The dodo is one of Colossal's target species along with woolly mammoths and Tasmanian tigers. Ahead of my call with Lamm, Colossal sent me an embargoed press release about its latest advances in avian cellular science, or "bringing the dodo revival one step closer." The dodo went extinct around 1690 after humans destroyed its habitat. Bringing it back will be a complex choreography of bird reproductive technology, starting with the import of the near-threatened Nicobar pigeon, the dodo's closest living relative. Colossal has obtained all the required permits, per the company's press release, and currently has a colony of breeding Nicobars living in Texas. The company has analyzed ancient dodo DNA and will try to replicate the lost bird's specific markers in Nicobars through gene editing.

The cloning process involved in creating the dire wolves won't be possible for the dodoes; scientists haven't figured out how to clone birds yet. So instead, Colossal has designed a new method involving gene-edited chickens that will lay eggs containing CRISPR-edited Nicobar pigeons. "It's like if you put a duck's primordial germ cells in these two chickens, then they mate. The egg opens up and it's a duck," says Lamm. "I know it sounds crazy, but that's how it works. It's pretty cool."

Will this yield a dodo in a few years? Or simply a mutant bird that resembles a dodo? In April, when the company announced that it had brought back dire wolves, one of its own scientific advisers called the creation "a dog with 20 edits." Lamm argues that his company's creations are in fact dodoes, dire wolves, and mammoths and that species taxonomy has always been a human-imposed categorization system anyway. "If people want to go see Jurassic Park and tell their kids it's a movie about genetically modified frog-birds, that's fun too," says Lamm.

Many question whether spending hundreds of millions of dollars to resurrect dodoes and woolly mammoths could be better spent conserving the habitats of the thousands of other less memeable birds on the brink of extinction. "Cloning and other biotechnology cannot protect [animals] from cars or bullets, nor do they increase human empathy," writes Dr. Joseph Hinton, a wolf-conservation research scientist, about Colossal's work. The created dire wolves currently live, per Colossal's press materials, "on a secure, expansive ecological reserve." The eventual woolly mammoths will apparently be "rewilded," "immediately restoring the tundra's role as a climate protector and balancer of greenhouse gases." When gene-edited animals have been released in the past, it hasn't always been positive for existing ecosystems. "GloFish," zebra fish originally developed as a pollution indicator and then sold for the pet market, are currently invading Brazil's Atlantic Forest creeks. According to a paper by Brazilian biologist André Lincoln Barroso Magalhães, GloFish can be aggressive, chasing and nipping native species. Because they are genetically modified, it's unclear exactly what kind of damage they could cause, per the country's environmental regulator, which is in the process of seizing the animals from stores.

Gene editing and cloning are inherently trial-and-error processes, says Paul Knoepfler, a professor of cell biology and human anatomy at the UC Davis School of Medicine: "There can be a lot of unsuccessful outcomes, right? Like miscarriages in animals, animals that aren't born healthy. The animals you produce may not have the trait you think they will, or they'll have a developmental problem." In the case of those extra-muscular piglets, for instance, knocking out one gene ended up making their tongues grow so large they couldn't fit in their mouths. (Colossal, for its part, says it is certified by the American Humane Society and avoids off-target effects in its animals by performing costly genomic sequencing at every stage of its process as well as testing prospective edits in mice.)

Look carefully and Schubarth and Colossal seem like aspiring Dr. Frankensteins of vastly different scales. It's not hard to imagine a Colossal conservation park in Texas just down the road from the fenced ranches where some descendants of Schubarth's argali spend their lives before heading to the trophy room. Tinkering with the rare fringes of the animal kingdom can serve noble goals: de-extinction for conservation, improving herd health. But the economic value of the animals they produce may really just be entertainment.

Entertainment is the explicit goal for Josie Zayner, a founder of the Los Angeles Project. The start-up announced in February in Wired that it was just a month away from birthing glow-in-the-dark pet rabbits. The long-term plan is to make unicorns and dragons through gene editing. Zayner feels that novelty animals needn't save the planet or help cure a disease. "I think Colossal created this whole image about this de-extinction company in order to avoid backlash from gene-editing animals," Zayner recently tells me on the phone. "But I think it's like, Fuck it. If you're going to go all in, go all in, you know. We can be like any other technology. We can be just like something that's interesting and fun and cool." Before co-founding the company, Zayner was known as a biohacking biochemist famous for selling CRISPR kits to the public and injecting herself with jelly-fish DNA. Her co-founder, Cathy Tie, is a former Thiel fellow and biotech prodigy.

Knoepfler of UC Davis says the unicorn idea is not as far-fetched as it may sound. "Making unicorns is the low-hanging fruit in this space," he wrote in a recent blog post. "You can probably introduce horn-producing genes into horses, and you might have some unicornlike results. It's probably not that simple, but it'll be far easier than making a dragon. I wouldn't be surprised at all if they made loads of money and got huge investments from tech bros and others ... Imagine what someone like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk might pay for a convincing dragonlike creature. A billion?"

Selling dragons and unicorns won't be as simple on the regulatory front as making glow-in-the-dark monkeys for research. In the U.S., if gene-edited animals are created in labs and won't end up in the commercial food supply, they need no specific approval. (Though once they're created, they fall under federal regulations.) Gene-edited animals sold to the food and pet market, however, do need an FDA sign-off. This means that so far, only a few mutant animals have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for commercial sale in the U.S. The first, approved by the FDA in 2015, was the AquAdvantage salmon, a transgenic fish that grows year-round instead of just in the spring and summer. This past spring, the newest gene-edited animal was approved by the agency: a pig that will be resistant to a common virus and whose meat can soon be sold at supermarkets.

Approval can take years, and even well-intentioned and well-funded animal mutants have hit snags. A few years ago, a hornless dairy bull was engineered by an agricultural start-up in collaboration with scientists at UC Davis. This genetic change was performed to try to make dairy farming more humane. If horns never grow, humans don't have to burn them off. But then the FDA discovered that the team accidentally added bacterial DNA with genes for antibiotic resistance to the bull, which was passed on to their calves. The animals were never commercialized. Perhaps to avoid regulatory hiccups, Colossal has taken the tack of courting the government and even accepting its investments. The CIA funded the company in 2022 through its venture-capital arm, and Colossal has spent about $240,000 lobbying Congress and state officials in the past year. The company met with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum ahead of its dire-wolf announcement. Burgum loves Colossal. "If we're going to be in anguish about losing a species, now we have an opportunity to bring them back," he told Interior Department employees during a livestream, as reported by the Washington Post. "Pick your favorite species and call up Colossal."

In February, just days after Zayner and Tie announced their new company to the media, lawmakers in California introduced legislation that would prohibit the sale of animals that have been gene-edited for cosmetic purposes. "Gene editing should be reserved for advancing medical research and addressing critical ecological challenges, not for turning animals into living accessories," says Judie Mancuso, founder and president of Social Compassion in Legislation. It has currently been referred to the Committee on Business and Professions for review. The Los Angeles Project -- now renamed the Embryo Corporation -- could take the Colossal route and lobby the federal government. Or it could try to pivot into an even more controversial area of gene editing: human embryos. Any biotech company creating novelty animals could discover insights into a fundamental scientific question with implications for every organism: What is the relationship between genes and actual characteristics? "It's very possible these companies may learn more about how certain genes regulate specific traits," says Knoepfler. This could be used to treat human diseases. Or make designer babies.

In June, Tie stepped away from the Los Angeles Project and linked up with a scientist from Colossal to start a company called Manhattan Project. It announced plans to gene-edit human embryos "to eliminate inherited genetic diseases." "I have always wanted to do human gene-editing. Every scientist does," Zayner recently posted. "If they say otherwise they are lying."

Since the government's raid three years earlier, Schubarth had been barred from selling sheep. But hundreds of hybrid super-sheep with the prohibited MMK genetics were still living on his ranch. Schubarth had been caring for the animals in hopes that they would be rehomed. But in the spring of 2024, after his arraignment, Schubarth got bad news: The government expected all of those animals to be culled. Soon after, he sent the animals to a slaughter facility that would donate the meat to a local food bank.

Ahead of his sentencing hearing that fall, Schubarth's daughter submitted a letter to the court. "As for my father's demeanor, it's embarrassment, shame, and hurt. He isn't as jovial and outgoing. He's quiet." She is in her 60s and semi-retired, and she gave her dad her life savings to cover his legal fees and animal expenses during the investigation. "In my heart of hearts, I know he feels he let me down," she wrote. "This has hurt him in the worst way. We haven't really talked about our feelings, because when we do we both cry." At the hearing, the judge said he'd had a hard time coming up with the sentence for an elderly man who'd used his vast knowledge of farm life to create a fantastical creature. Still, he said, as Schubarth's wife and daughter cried, "we have enough problems in the world to deal with without people trying to change the genetic makeup of the creatures that are here on this earth." He landed on six months of prison as a deterrent to other mad barnyard scientists.

That may be too late given the likely spread of MMK's genetics. "There are alot of people with alot of Marco Polo hybrids," wrote one breeder and hunter on Facebook this past winter. "Sportsmen will be reaping the benefits for years to come." Among the community of sheep fanatics, his sentencing feels like an absurd example of government overreach. "They will crucify an old man for playing with sheep," posted one. "But cloning a Woolly mammoth ... and altering their DNA is ok," wrote another sarcastically.

Since he was seized from Schubarth's ranch by the Feds, MMK has been held in limbo. For three years, as the government built its investigation, he lived in Oregon at a wildlife sanctuary. Schubarth thought he looked skinny and unhappy in the photo from the facility released to the media by the government during his court case. But in October 2024, soon after his sentencing, the government announced that MMK was moving to Rosamond Gifford Zoo in Central New York. There, he is on exhibit along with several other exotic ruminants. The zoo hosted a press conference to announce the news. "This animal is an incredibly special acquisition in that he is actually a clone," read the press release. "Before his confiscation, Tilek was at the heart of an elaborate wildlife trafficking scheme that made global headlines." Tilek, his new name, was picked by the zoo-keepers who now care for him. It's a Kyrgyz word that means "dream."