In March, I wrote about Angus, a cow with a precarious future.
In 2024, an art collective embarked on a new piece called Our Cow Angus.
Here’s what they did:
- Bought a young cow.
- Named it Angus.
- Presold Angus as 1,200 hamburgers and four leather handbags.
- Exchanged customers’ cash for “Angus Tokens” — redeemable when Angus reaches slaughtering age.
Then they waited for Angus to grow up.
Two years later, in 2026, it was time to cash in your tokens. Angus is approaching slaughtering age, but before they did so, the organizers did something interesting:
They gave token holders the chance to vote on what happens next.
If, by March 13, 2026, more than half of the token holders canceled their purchases through an online portal, Angus would live the rest of his life in an animal sanctuary.
If not, he dies, and hamburgers and handbags are added to the world supply.
At the time that I wrote the post, 31.8% of token-owners voted to keep Angus alive.
Angus needed about 18% of token owners to cancel their orders by the end of March, or he’d be off to the slaughterhouse.
So this art collective had effectively turned the process of meat production into a story, filled with stakes, suspense, and ultimately, possibly surprise.
It was a story containing emotion and intrigue.
Heroes and villains
Questions of practicality and morality.
Then I introduced the story to my students. Each day we clicked on the site to check Angus’s status.
The percentage rarely changed, and when it did, it only increased by tenths of a percent.
Things were not looking good for Angus.
With just a day to go, he was still more than 16% away from death.
So I prepared the kids for the worst. Reminded them of the number of cheeseburgers they ate in a month. Held my breath on the final day when I clicked on the site, and on our Smartboard, we saw that the number of token-owners voting to keep Angus alive had shot up to 50.7% — thus preserving his life.
My students leaped from their seats.
They screamed with excitement.
Some of them hugged and high-fived.
At least two kids had tears in their eyes.
They were so loud that my friend Cindy, who taught in the room adjacent to me, came in to see if everything was okay.
It was a surprising and joyous moment for 20 children and, admittedly, one teacher.
These are the kinds of moments I will miss most now that I am no longer a teacher.
I suspect I will yearn for these kinds of moments.
If you’re interested in reading more about Angus, you can click here.
