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It’s long been assumed cows are not intelligent enough to make or use tools. But that assumption is being challenged by a back-scratching bovine named Veronika.
The cow’s impressive knack for the tool, is a talent that until now had been undocumented in cattle.
Veronika is a Swiss brown cow kept not for milk or meat but as a pet by Witgar Wiegele, an organic farmer and baker in Austria. He first noticed her using a long-handled brush, holding it in her mouth to scratch awkward parts of her body more than a decade ago.
A video clip of this cow’s behaviour soon reached Alice Auersperg, a cognitive biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, who found it “immediately clear that this was not accidental”.
“This was a meaningful example of tool use in a species that is rarely considered from a cognitive perspective,” Dr Auesperg said.
“The findings highlight how assumptions about livestock intelligence may reflect gaps in observation rather than genuine cognitive limits,” she added.
Dr Auersperg and her colleague, Antonio Osuna-Mascaró, traveled to meet and conduct a series of behavioural tests with Veronika.
For the study published in the Cell Press journal Current Biology the scientists randomly placed a deck brush on the ground and recorded how the cow used it. Over repeated sessions they found her choices were functional and consistent.
“We show that a cow can engage in genuinely flexible tool use,” says Dr Osuna-Mascaró. “Veronika is not just using an object to scratch herself. She uses different parts of the same tool for different purposes, and she applies different techniques depending on the function of the tool and the body region.”
Veronika typically prefers the bristled end of a deck brush when scratching broad, firm areas such as her back. But when targeting softer and more sensitive regions of her lower body, she switches to the smooth stick end.
She also changes how she uses the tool: upper-body scratching involves wide, forceful movements, while her lower-body scratching is slower, more careful, and highly controlled, the researchers say.
This type of flexible, multi-purpose use of a single tool is rare and outside of humans, it has previously been demonstrated convincingly only in chimpanzees, the researchers say in their paper.
But Veronika’s life circumstances may have played an important role – a long lifespan, daily contact with humans, and access to a rich physical landscape.
Most cows do not reach her age, do not live in open and complex environments, and are rarely given the opportunity to interact with a variety of manipulable objects, researchers explain.
The team is now interested in understanding which environmental and social conditions allow such behaviours to emerge in livestock species, and how many similar cases may have gone unnoticed simply because no one was looking for them.
“Because we suspect this ability may be more widespread than currently documented,” Dr Osuna-Mascaró said, “we invite readers who have observed cows or bulls using sticks or other handheld objects for purposeful actions to contact us.”
