A tool-using cow is challenging what we know about farm animal intelligence

In news that is sure to delight fans of a certain Gary Larson cartoon turned meme about the limitations of bovine cognition, cow tools are real.

Larson’s 1982 comic for his series The Far Side showed a cow standing behind a table bearing an array of oddly shaped objects. The text below the image read simply “cow tools.” Now a pet cow named Veronika has been documented not only wielding a tool but doing so in a surprisingly sophisticated way. The observation adds a new species to the growing list of creatures that have been found to use external objects to achieve a goal. It also hints that society has been underestimating the minds of farm animals.

The story begins more than a decade ago in the small Austrian town of Nötsch im Gailtal, where organic farmer and baker Witgar Wiegele first saw his family’s pet Swiss Brown cow, Veronika, pick up sticks and use them to scratch herself. When cognitive biologist Alice M. I. Auersperg of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna watched a video recording of Veronika’s behavior, “it was immediately clear that this was not accidental,” she said in a statement. “This was a meaningful example of tool use in a species that is rarely considered from a cognitive perspective.”

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Auersperg and her colleague Antonio J. Osuna-Mascaró, a postdoctoral researcher at the same institution, visited Veronika and her human family, who welcomed the researchers with freshly baked bread and apple strudel. “Veronika is very friendly,” says Osuna-Mascaró, who spent that summer observing her. “She also has a close bond with Witgar,” he notes. “Not only does Witgar prepare and sell bread, he also distributes it around the area. It was interesting to see Veronika watching every passing car with interest and trying to guess if the driver was Witgar. If she thought it was him, she would moo with all her might.”

The researchers analyzed how Veronika used one particular tool—a deck brush—to scratch herself. Observing Veronika’s behavior over dozens of trials, the researchers found that she pushed the broom back and forth exclusively across the rear half of her body, including the rump, loin, udder and belly regions that would otherwise be difficult for her to reach. She precisely manipulated the broom with her mouth, using her tongue to lift it and her teeth to secure it in place. She targeted the thick-skinned upper areas of her body with the bristled end and the more sensitive underparts with the smooth stick end. She also scrubbed more vigorously on tougher parts of her skin and used gentle pushes on her delicate parts.

To the casual observer, using a broom to scratch an itch might not seem like an act of genius. But the way Veronika changed her grip on the broom and her movement of it in anticipation of the outcome calls to mind tool-using behaviors in the famously clever primates and corvids (crows and their kin). Moreover, the way she uses the two broom ends differently “constitutes the use of a multipurpose tool, exploiting distinct properties of a single object for different functions,” Osuna-Mascaró and Auersperg write in their paper on the findings, published in Current Biology. Among nonhuman species, that kind of multipurpose tool use has been consistently documented only in chimpanzees.

Such abilities may be widespread in cattle. “We don’t believe that Veronika is the Einstein of cows,” Osuna-Mascaró says. Together with anecdotal reports of tool use in cattle from South Asia, the results hint that the capacity for complex problem-solving behaviors, including tool use, might have ancient evolutionary roots but that such behaviors emerge only when conditions are favorable.

As a companion animal, Veronika, now 13 years old, has lived a long life in a stimulating environment. Nötsch im Gailtal is “the most idyllic place imaginable for an Austrian cow, like straight out of The Sound of Music,” Osuna-Mascaró says. He says the family contributed to Veronika’s tool use by “providing the special conditions that enabled Veronika to express herself.”

Although she learned to use tools on her own, starting with branches that had fallen from trees, Wiegele later furnished her with sticks and rakes that allowed her to perfect her scratching techniques. Most livestock animals, in contrast, live much shorter lives and spend their time in impoverished settings such as factory farms without access to objects that they can manipulate.

“This is fantastic! I applaud the authors, as well as Veronika,” says primatologist Jill Pruetz of Texas State University, who was not involved in the new research. Pruetz studies how environmental factors influence the behavior of tool-using chimpanzees. She also has two companion cows of her own, Claire and Edith. “I am not completely surprised that cattle can use tools—after living in close proximity to my two cows for about seven years now, I have a lot more respect for bovine intelligence,” Pruetz says. “What strikes me about Veronika’s tool use is the precision with which she can manipulate the tool as well as switch its ends to target specific areas.”

The new paper, Pruetz adds, illustrates the need for enrichment for the welfare of cattle. “There are around 1.5 billion heads of cattle in the world, and humans have lived with them for at least 10,000 years. It’s shocking that we’re only discovering this now,” Osuna-Mascaró says. “We know more about the tool use of exotic animals on remote islands than we do about the cows we live with. But we are now starting to be sensitive enough to observe them and give, at least to a few of them, the life they deserve, one in which they have the opportunity to play, interact with objects, and discover how to use them on their own.”