Mouflon birth of an exotic animal such as the mouflon. If cloning of the mouflon can proceed successfully, it has the potential to reduce strain on the number of living specimens. Mouflon The mouflon ("Ovis orientalis orientalis" group) is a subspecies group of the wild sheep ("Ovis orientalis"). Populations of "O. orientalis" can be partitioned into the mouflons ("orientalis" group) and the urials ("vignei" group). The mouflon is thought to be the ancestor for all modern domestic sheep breeds. The wild sheep of Corsica were locally called "mufro" (male) and "mufra" (female). The French naturalist Buffon (1707–1788) rendered this in French
European mouflon 800. In Sardinia, the numbers in 1955 were around 700, but in 1967 this had fallen to just 300. Through protection programmes, the population rose however to over 1,000 in 1980. In 2015 there were an estimated 6,000 mouflon in Sardinia. The relatively low numbers in Corsica contrast with the rest of the current range of the mouflon. Today the largest numbers live in the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary and Austria and there are still large populations in France, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia and Bulgaria. In the introduced populations of Central Europe it is estimated that there are over 60,000 mouflon