Investors Have One Day to Save This Cow From Slaughter

Angus the cow is doomed beyond Friday—unless he can convince investors that he ought not to be slaughtered. Back in 2024, Brooklyn art collective MSCHF bought a black calf dubbed Angus and sold 404 shares in him, promising he would be turned into 1,200 patties and four leather bags once he reached maturity, unless investors decided to save his life, per Art Newspaper. But with Friday's deadline approaching, only a third of Angus' token-holders have logged into MSCHF's "Remorse Portal" to surrender their claims and vote to spare him, the Wall Street Journal reports. He needs over 50% to live out the rest of his days at an animal sanctuary.

Animal-rights advocates call the project cruel, while curators defend it as a blunt look at how people compartmentalize eating beef. Angus' plight is hardly unusual given that some 32 million cattle were slaughtered for beef production in the US in 2024. Yet the bull has developed quite the following with updates on his life on a meat-production farm in upstate New York. MSCHF says the cost of slaughtering Angus is roughly the same as funding his care for another two decades.

But saving Angus would require people to change their minds and give up their investments; 400 tokens for three burger patties were initially sold for $35, with the four handbag tokens selling for $1,200 each, and some of those tokens were later resold at higher prices. At least one handbag token has been surrendered, per Art Newspaper, but that only represents 12.5% of total shares. From the start, curators assumed Angus' death was probably inevitable, "but now it's heart-wrenching," MSCHF co-founder Kevin Wiesner tells the Journal, promising the group will follow through on investors' wishes.