Whether for animal welfare or the environment, many of us feel at least a twinge of guilt eating meat. But when you walk up to the butcher counter, it’s too late to protest. Yes, you can vote on a ballot or vote with your wallet. But individually, we have very little power to challenge the power structures of the world that are destroying it.
“This is the problem with all sorts of climate messaging. It’s too big to deal with, right? Like your brain shuts down,” says Kevin Wiesner, co-chief creative officer at the unapologetically viral Brooklyn art collective Mschf. “Also, most of the damage is already done.”
But what if the world were different? That’s the premise of Our Cow Angus, the latest project from Mschf. Angus is the name of a calf that the studio purchased earlier this year, currently grazing in upstate NY. Already destined for the slaughterhouse in two years, the company is pre-selling Angus’s meat as 400 3-packs of burgers (priced at $30) and three handbags (priced at $1,000) starting today.
However, this being Mschf, there’s a twist. If you decide that you’d like to spare Angus, you can forfeit your burger or bag. If 51% of spenders opt to save Angus, the funds will be repurposed for Angus’s living expenses.
“It’s either you pay for the product, and you get the product, or you pay for Angus to live for the rest of his life,” says Lukas Bentel, chief creative officer at Mschf.
With each purchase, buyers receive a small gold token that’s shaped like a cow’s ear tag. It’s a collectible keepsake, and it also has a tamper proof sticker called The Seal of Regret. Rip that seal away, and you have a code that you can put into a website that relinquishes your prize for the sake of Angus. The way Mschf has weighed voting, at least one purchaser of the bag—the biggest spenders—will need to give it up to save Angus’s life.
The project was originally inspired by how PETA and other animal rights activists protested Mschf’s Lil Nas X “Satan Shoe,” which was an Air Max filled with (a drop) of goat’s blood. “We all know that like the joke is like, the one group you never want mad at you is like PETA,” laughs Wiesner. “The reactions were so bad that we actually sat down internally, like, ‘OK, we have a real problem, guys. We can’t use goat’s blood.’ And so instead it was like, ‘Well, OK, we’re gonna use people’s blood—[since] that’s fine!’”
There was a certain irony to the premise that using human blood inside a shoe was less offensive than another animal’s, much like there’s a certain irony to the fact that protecting Angus’s life will require activists to relinquish their own values and spend cash on meat.
“If you are upset about this, there are immediate actions you can take to save Angus! You should buy burgers!” says Wiesner. ”Get tokens and relinquish them.”
But the project isn’t interesting as some long-term, cow-hostage prank on PETA. (Truly, Angus is but one of tens of millions of cows we slaughter in the U.S. each year to appease our 41 pound annual appetite of beef.) Rather, it’s interesting because Mschf is calling society out on its own bluff—addressing the angel on our shoulder with its latent guilt of consuming meat, while also tempting the devil on our shoulder that might want to taste that hypebeast burger drop or acquire one of three bespoke handbags that could be worth. Every day, we trade the well-being of our planet for our own, and Our Cow Angus is just a microcosm of this idea.
“What I think is psychologically compelling about the project is that we all know eating meat is bad, right,” floats Wiesner. While he is no animal rights activist, Wiesner acknowledges the clear science that beef consumption is terrible for our planet. “What Angus does is it constructs a situation where you can take a meaningful retroactive action, where you get drawn in because of your desire for the cow. And then you can be remorseful.”
Or not.
“I’m interested in seeing where this plays out community-wise,” says Bentel, who notes it’s just as likely that Rightists will unite to spite-consume as many burgers as possible as Leftists will coordinate for a mass refund. He argues this unpredictable social chaos is the art of the project. “We’re putting out a scenario and experiment, and we don’t know what the conclusion will be . . . setting up a scenario where you’re only talking to one side is not helpful.”