For a cow, Veronika has had what might be considered an idyllic life. She lives in a picturesque town in Austria, surrounded by snow-capped mountains and glacial lakes.She is a beloved family pet, rather than a production animal, and spends her days ambling through tree-lined pastures. And when she has an itch, she scratches it – by expertly wielding a stick.
Now, in a new study, Veronika has demonstrated more advanced scratching skills, deploying different ends of a wooden broom to target different parts of her body.It is, scientists say, an example of flexible tool use, a behaviour that is relatively rare in the animal kingdom. The paper, which was published in Current Biology, is the first scientific paper to describe tool use in cattle, which have not traditionally been celebrated for their smarts.
“We use them as a synonym for silliness and stupidity,” said Alice Auersperg, a cognitive biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna and an author of the study. (The paper cites a famous Gary Larson cartoon whose premise seems to be that the very idea of cows devising tools is absurd.)
Veronika’s capabilities “should give us some pause and perhaps also motivate us to look at livestock animals differently,” Auersperg said.
Veronika also raises a more provocative possibility: that perhaps one reason cows have been underestimated is that few of them get the opportunity to develop or demonstrate their cognitive abilities.
