Will Angus Live or Become Luxury? MSCHF’s Ethical Experiment Unraveled
The fate of a baby cow hangs in the balance. Will you use his skin for fashion, his flesh for food? Or will you succumb to buyer’s remorse and save his life?
With these options as food for thought, any concerns that MSCHF has lost its edge have been quelled. The Brooklyn-based satirical art collective’s latest project posed a seemingly innocuous question: would you rather eat a burger or rescue an animal from becoming said burger?
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Except, it’s not innocuous because it wasn’t rhetorical.
Meet Angus: a young calf born this past March currently free-roaming on a 300-acre farm in upstate New York. MSCHF purchased the baby bull for a cool $10,000, give or take, and effectively tokenized him. Literally, in the sense that the minds behind Satan Shoes pre-sold Angus as 1,200 burgers (in the form of a $35 three-pack token) and four handbags ($1,200 a pop)—all to be entirely produced from this cow two years from now when he reaches the typical slaughtering age—but also metaphorically.
“I would like to see what happens [to Angus]. I’m not sure I have a preference, because he’s going to be really tasty,” Kevin Wiesner, MSCHF’s chief creative officer, told Sourcing Journal. “He is also incredibly cute.”
In true MSCHF fashion, there is, of course, a twist.
Those 404 tokens (four for handbags, 400 as three-pack burgers) have unique codes that mark their pre-order status. The token serves as a proof-of-purchase, marking its owner as an official “Angus Steakholder.” These slices of Angus sold out “very, very, very fast,” per Wiesner.
Each token has two tamper-proof seals—the Seal of Regret and the Seal of Sending—presenting “steakholders” with a choice. You can keep the token and receive your product in 2026 or sell it on a secondary market at an insane, albeit ethically ambiguous, markup à la retail arbitrage. As it currently stands, burger tokens are selling at a 600 percent hike for over $250 on StockX.
In both cases, Angus will die. The other option is to remove the “Seal of Regret” and enter the “cow code” into the “Remorse Portal.” MSCHF makes clear that this is purely a moral decision, and no refunds are offered.
“In our base reality, no action offsetting consumption can be taken retroactively,” the project’s landing page, Our Cow Angus, reads. “Angus, via the Burger Preorder, constructs an artificial circumstance in which remorse becomes actionable. When the post-purchase glow wears off and you’re staring down the barrel of two years of pathos-laden bovine bildungsroman you can in fact concretely reverse your consumer choice.”
The Vans defendant will be providing farm-fresh updates from the calf via a “moosletter” detailing Angus’ adventures—making that decision that much tougher. If more than 50 percent of pre-order interest is given up, Angus will live happily ever after with the proceeds funding his “worry-free retirement.” It’s worth noting that the handbag tokens hold a heavier weight (16.7 percent stake) than the burger tokens (a 1 percent stake). If every handbag token holder deems Angus delicious, every single burger token holder would have to exhibit conscious consumerism.
“What Angus is doing is it’s very clearly setting up where you can say, ‘yes, my individual choice matters,’” Wiesner said. “It matters exactly one out of 400 or one out of four handbags which is vanishingly small but, to be honest, it’s pretty good compared to what your individual actions are going to do, at least, for most of us on any substantial issue.”
Why would MSCHF do such a thing? Wiesner offered few reasons.
“MSCHF is a supply chain power user; we’re constantly making products in different categories, different industries, and that means we’re constantly learning about how things are made. And then often never doing anything again with that information,” Wiesner said. “We kind of just have a vested interest in the process, to some extent, and a living animal.”
Consider Angus as a “hyper-object,” a term coined by environmental philosopher Timothy Morton that describes things (cows, capitalism, climate change) that are “within our understanding but beyond our immediate grasp.” Consider the “myth of individual consumer responsibility propagated by polluting industry interests,” MSCHF proposes.
“Old MSCHF is so fucking back (performance art designed to make you uncomfortable,” X user by the handle @birdhusband posted. “The ethics of meat consumption against abstraction of the animal, regret as an actionable force, the marketing of life under late-stage capitalism. This one has it all.”
When one is tasked with making a decision, particularly those large-scale in nature that yield decidedly good or decidedly bad results, that individual may opt for defeatism and make no decision at all.
Through Our Cow Angus, this analysis paralysis is avoidable, as the living and breathing animal represents “a dream where individual actions demonstrably matter.” With this project, MSCHF seems to ask leather lovers to unpack their outrage when confronted with the meat paradox, seemingly encouraging cognitive dissonance.
“I think that in some ways Angus is both an artificially constructed scenario and a satire of the notion of individual responsibility. I think that we’re in a weird moment where, generally, there is kind of an awareness that the idea ‘if we all just recycle the world would be saved’ is an extremely useful philosophy to large corporations,” Wiesner said. “That awareness has just massively depressed a lot of people to the point of inaction entirely, which is understandable, but also kind of unfortunate.”
Animal enthusiasts and the internet at large aren’t convinced this “constructed reality” is anything other than cruel.
“Do you feel remorse when you eat a burger or buy a leather bag? Would you give that item up to save the creatures life? Why or why not?” one Twitter user by the handle @haleyhuxleyxoxo asked. “Maybe the only difference here is that this is making you think about it, and giving you a chance at intervention.”
Animal rights organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) reminded the arbiters of Angus of the creature’s inherent gentle nature, clever disposition and maternal instinct.
“At a time when most people wish to see violence diffused, it’s shameful for MSCHF to make a game out of snuffing out a life,” Colleen O’Brien, PETA’s senior vice president, told Sourcing Journal. “PETA is urging the group to stop reaching for relevance at a vulnerable animal’s expense and to send this cow to a reputable sanctuary or allow us to do that for them—and we’re sending them one of our Empathy Kits because someone there is desperately in need of a lesson about respect for others of all kinds.”
Nonetheless, the Birkin bag destroyer believes Our Cow Angus “fulfills the fantasy of market mechanisms for social change,” according to its manifesto. That said, the possibility of greed overriding any moral compass is intentional.
“Part of the thing that this project is doing is this is like the funky capitalism version of socially conscious consumerism,” Wiesner said. “It’s not just about what you buy being an indicator of what positions you support. It’s giving you a second chance.”