MuckFlash

Susanville, CA -11 May 2009- A 34 year old man was arrested and indicted on charges of conspiracy and animal abuse as California state marshals, in conjunction with a task force of northern California game wardens, uncovered what they alleged was an elaborate plot to conduct a series of raids on national parks across California and seize endangered wildlife. The suspect, Gary McClintock, is currently being held on a $300,000 bond.

According to an affidavit filed by the California District Attorney in support of the search warrant used to raid McClintock’s secluded ranch, McClintock had planned for months to capture hundreds of bighorn sheep throughout the Sierra Nevada mountains and hold them at his 45 acre ranch just outside of the rural northern California town of Susanville. McClintock, according to the affadavit, was a lifelong animal rights activist and believed that the sheep were being held prisoner by the California State Parks Service.

A political pamphlet reprinted in the affidavit and authored by McClintock accuses state and federal parks services of “enslaving the four legged angels wrought by god” in order to “establish the infernal goals of freemasonry and political sodomy.” The 45 page pamphlet, entitled “Animals of Light, Fields of Lies,” further details a complicated series of government plots to trap animals on federal and state land in order to use them as bargaining chips with Native American drug lords in Canada and South America. “Through trade agreements and false political deals, the government uses the safety and security of these gorgeous beings as a [sic] collateral to buy and traffic narcotics from the enslaved Native populations of the once mighty nation of Zezumi,” McClintock asserts in the pamphlet’s introduction. “We must stop them before our redeeming animals of light are sacrificed and eternal spiritual war ensues.”

McClintock’s neighbors, however, put a slightly different spin on the story. “He was a bit queer with the sheep,” suggested Bill Johnson, whose ranch is adjacent to McClintock’s. “He had a big stable full of animals, and he’d mosey on out to his lawn near about every Saturday with them all made up like the night women up near Fort Bragg.” Although Johnson refused to go into further detail, he did admit that McClintock had “serious difficulty” interacting with people and rarely left his ranch.

Phil Thompson, another of McClintock’s neighbors and the owner of a feed and tack outlet which McClintock frequented to supply his ranch, agreed with Johnson’s interpretation. “I know what you need to maintain a ranch, and Gary’s purchases were awful strange. He’d come in maybe once every two months to get a couple of new leather harnesses, some rubber balls and maybe a cattle prod or two. No oats, no alfalfa. You just wonder what he was doing all alone up there with the sheep all the time. And the noises you would hear every Saturday. People knew that you best avoided the old McClintock place on Saturdays.”

Authorities refused to comment on the investigation, since it is ongoing, but they did confirm that McClintock was being held and would be charged with conspiracy. McClintock’s publicly appointed lawyer declined to comment.