Belgrade Man Accused Of Selling Ram Testicles To Hybrid Sheep Breeder
Author: Seaborn Larson, Montana State News Bureau
Belgrade Man Accused of Selling Ram Testicles to Hybrid Sheep Breeder
Seaborn Larson
Montana State News Bureau
The prosecution of a Vaughn man who was sentenced to prison earlier this year for engineering a hybrid sheep for captive trophy hunting has now sprawled to a man charged with selling testicles to the breeder.
John Edward Lewton, of Belgrade, was charged last week with one count of violating the Lacey Act, a federal law that, among other things, prohibits the sale of wildlife parts in violation of state law.
Montana law prohibits the sale of game except for the hide, head or mount.
Lewton, according to federal prosecutors, sold for $400 the testicles of a trophy ram to Arthur "Jack" Schubarth, who was sentenced in September to federal prison time for using those testicles and tissue from sheep in Central Asia and the U.S. to create hybrid sheep for captive trophy hunting in Texas and Minnesota.
Federal prosecutors from the U.S. Department of Justice environmental crimes section and the U.S. Attorney's Office of Montana filed the charge against Lewton on Dec. 23.
The same day, they filed a plea agreement signed by Lewton, who in a phone interview on Tuesday disagreed with much of the case against him but said taking the plea deal and fine would be cheaper than fighting the charge in court.
The $400, Lewton contended, was for gas for driving the testicles to Schubarth, not for the gonads themselves.
Further, Lewton said Schubarth had contacted several people "in the sheep business" about procuring the testicles.
"What he told us is that he was saving the genetics for when the herd dies off, so that they have the genetics," he said. "He didn't say anything about game-ranching this [expletive]."
Lewtown is a guide and in October 2019 his client took a trophy-sized Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep on Bureau of Land Management land in Montana. Lewton took the testicles from the kill site and brought them to Vaughn.
He said Tuesday he never met Schubarth, only dropped them off with his wife at their Great Falls pet store
.
Schubarth later extracted semen from the sheep testicles and sold it to buyers out of state, according to federal prosecutors.
Schubarth's operation ran nearly a decade. He bought parts of the largest sheep in the world, Marco Polo argali sheep, from Kyrgyzstan into the United States without declaring the importation, federal prosecutors said in his case. To move his hybrid sheep in and out of Montana, Schubart and others forged veterinary inspection certificates, falsely claiming the sheep were legally permitted species, authorities said.
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks said this spring that Schubarth's crimes could "threaten the integrity of our wildlife species in Montana".
Lewton, meanwhile, claimed to be essentially a bystander in Schubarth's operation. He had intended to give Schubarth the testicles without any compensation, simply hoping to help the species.
He did, however, cash that $400 check Schubarth sent him after delivery.
"I told him I don't need any money," Lewton said Tuesday.
This is not Lewton's first brush with hunting violations. In 2009, he was charged after guiding without a license. In that instance, FWP investigators sent an undercover officer to hunt with Lewton to make their case.
That undercover officer killed a ram, triggering felony charges against Lewton and raising questions about whether the agency had gone too far to catch Lewton in the act. The ram the agent killed turned out to be a state record, and the agent had crossed private property with Lewton to reach the animal. Three men were charged as a result of that investigation, but by 2012 the cases evaporated without any convictions; all three men were acquitted at jury trials.
Lewton agreed to plead guilty to the misdemeanor federal case related to Schubarth's hybrid sheep breeding scheme to avoid the costs of another trial, he said Tuesday.
A court date has not yet been set for him to plead guilty to the charge before U.S. District Court Judge Susan Watters of Billings.
This article was published in the Jan. 02, 2025 Helena Independent Record
