In his “Talking Business” column yes­ter­day, Joe Nocera did not have very nice things to say about Wayne Pacelle or the Humane Soci­ety of the United States. Nocera’s angry that the shut­down of the Westland/Hallmark slaugh­ter­house, where “emaciated cows [were] being man­han­dled with fork lifts and repeat­edly shocked” led to a recall of 143 mil­lion pounds of beef, the largest such recall in the nation’s history.

By my lights both Pacelle and the Humane Soci­ety get a pretty bum rap from Nocera—who goes so far as to say that Pacelle is “playing Russ­ian roulette with the truth”—but he saved the unkind­est cut of all for Chico, Cal­i­for­nia, my beloved home­town. Here’s the offend­ing half-​sentence:

On Jan. 30, the animal rights orga­ni­za­tion had released a graphic and sick­en­ing video of so-​called downer cows being hor­ri­bly abused at a slaugh­ter­house in Chico, Calif….

The prob­lem is that there are no indus­trial slaugh­ter­houses in Chico. Falling prey to a common con­fu­sion, Nocera mis­took Chico—home of boun­ties like Sierra Nevada Beer, the Mother Hips, and the nation’s fourth- or fifth-​largest munic­i­pal park, depend­ing on who’s counting—for Chino, a city at the other end of the state that claims not one but two state pris­ons (plus a youth facil­ity), the afore­men­tioned Westland/Hallmark slaugh­ter­house, and the first wife of a famous fic­tional bigamist.

Let the paper of record stand corrected.