Nature
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An Austrian cow named Veronika has just joined the auspicious – and small – club of animals known to have the ability to use tools, and frankly, we’re a little bit in love.
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So, when Alice Auersperg and Antonio J. Osuna Mascaró at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna received footage of a Swiss brown cow in Carinthia, southern Austria, using a rake to scratch her own back, they were understandably excited: Had Cow tools been a prophetic vision?
While Veronika hadn't made her own tools, as Larson’s comic implies, she had picked up an object and aimed it at a target (herself) to achieve a goal. This meets a relatively strict definition of tool use – putting her ahead of two wolves documented pulling on crab traps in British Columbia in 2023. So Auersperg and Osuna Mascaró set out to meet her.
“You arrive in this beautiful idyllic Carinthian mountain village that looks like something out of The Sound of Music,” Auersperg told IFLScience. “You have the village with the church and the bells and the children at the school. It's all like out of a book. And in that environment lives Veronika the cow.”
The storybook feel was only enhanced when they met Veronika’s owner, Witgar Wiegele, an organic farmer and baker. After treating the pair to strudel (“a lot of strudel,” Auersperg clarified), Wiegele took them to see Veronika in her meadow.
The researchers had expected to wait before she showed off her talents, but they were pleasantly surprised. “Witgar just dropped the stick in front of her, and out comes, like a rolled carpet, the tongue, grasps the stick in the tip, rolls it in like a hand, pulls it back into the mouth, and then the mouth closes,” said Auersperg. “Then she just turns her head and starts scratching, like within seconds.”
According to Wiegele, Veronika – who is a family pet and is not kept for production of milk or beef – started clumsily picking up sticks to scratch herself when she was just 3 years old. Because she loved the sticks so much, Wiegele made sure there were always some in her paddock, and now, by the age of 13, she has mastered the technique.
Osuna Mascaró stayed in the valley for two weeks, filming Veronika in 70 trials across seven sessions to establish whether she was sensitive to the broom's properties – namely that the brush end is better for scratching than the handle. As expected, she tended to use the brush end, but sometimes she didn’t.
“From time to time, she was using the handle end to scratch herself, and at the beginning this looked like a mistake,” he said. “But after a while, we started to recognise a pattern.”
It turned out that Veronika would pick up the broom by the brush specifically so she could scratch her undercarriage with the handle. By using it this way, she could gently poke at the sensitive skin there without the roughness of the bristles. This makes the tool use multipurpose, a milestone only otherwise achieved by chimps using grass blades to hunt for termites.
The behavior is also anticipatory, as once locked between her jaws, she can't adjust the broom’s position. "Because Veronika is a cow at the end of the day, and she has no hands," Osuna Mascaró helpfully pointed out.
While this is the first scientific study of tool use in cows, there are videos online showing other cows and bulls doing similar things. Some of these animals are Brahman bulls – members of the species Bos indicus, which diverged from Veronika's species, Bos taurus, perhaps as far back as 2 million years ago.
We believe the reason that we may not see it a lot in cows is perhaps not because Veronika is some kind of bovine Einstein, but because she is kept different to other cows.
Alice Auersperg
To Auersperg and Osuna Mascaró, this suggests the capacity to develop such behavior lies deep within the nature of these animals, though they stress that a few instances of individuals using tools does not make a species as a whole “tool-users”.
"We believe the reason that we may not see it a lot in cows is perhaps not because Veronika is some kind of bovine Einstein, but because she is kept different to other cows," said Auersperg. “We have these animals that live next to us and we don't even think about looking for that.”
“We even used them, like in the Gary Larson cartoon, to mock them for an animal that could never be able to interact with tools, and that should give us some pause for thought. Perhaps the absurdity is not that a cow would use a tool, but that we haven't ever thought [...] it might be the case.”
If you've spotted an example of a cow using a tool, don't hesitate to send the footage to Antonio.OsunaMascaro@vetmeduni.ac.at.
The study is published in Current Biology.
