Big game hunter from Sacramento County sentenced for smuggling endangered species
A Sacramento County man was sentenced Tuesday to six months in federal prison for smuggling the carcass of an endangered species into the United States after a big-game hunt in Pakistan.
Jason Keith Bruce of Galt pleaded guilty in 2024 to conspiracy in the case, admitting he used forged documents to claim that the trophy he was bringing home was not a Ladakh urial, a type of wild sheep that is listed as endangered.
On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge John A. Mendez sentenced Bruce and ordered him to pay $85,000 in fines and serve two years of supervised release after completing his prison term.
In his plea agreement, Bruce admitted that he worked with a hunting company in Pakistan to kill the Ladakh urial and bring it home, where he had it mounted in a trophy room at his home. He pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy in the case.
In his plea agreement, he admitted that he and a co-conspirator in Pakistan planned to bribe local officials to help facilitate the removal of the trophy.
Bruce killed the sheep on one trip to Pakistan, posing with the carcass and taking credit for the kill, the plea agreement said. But he was barred by both U.S. and Pakistani law from bringing it back to the United States without permission, the agreement said.
To bring the animal back, prosecutors said, Bruce and the owner of a Pakistani hunting company pretended that a second big-game hunting trip had netted a different species of wild sheep that was not endangered. When bringing his trophies home, Bruce provided forged documents to customs officials, falsely claiming that all of the carcasses represented non-endangered Punjab urial sheep.
Bruce began planning the first hunting trip, for which he paid $50,000, in 2016, the plea agreement said. The second trip, for which he paid $35,000, took place in 2018, according to the agreement.
“He listed the species of the trophies he carried falsely, and did not include the Ladak urial among the species he claimed to have been carrying,” the plea agreement said.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers stopped Bruce when he arrived with eight carcasses at San Francisco International Airport in 2018. They alerted the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife, whose officers seized the trophies, later returning them to him after receiving assurances that they were legal. Those assurances turned out to be fake, the plea agreement said.
Federal prosecutors also charged the owner of the hunting company in the case, but he remains in Pakistan.
This story was originally published February 10, 2026 at 5:33 PM with the headline "Big game hunter from Sacramento County sentenced for smuggling endangered species."
