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 even 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 behavior that is relatively rare in the animal kingdom. The paper, which was published in Current Biology on Monday, 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,” Dr. Auersperg said.
Veronika also raises a more provocative possibility: that perhaps one reason cows have been underestimated is because very few of them get the opportunity to develop or demonstrate their cognitive abilities.
“One thing that makes Veronika different to other cows is perhaps not that she’s, like, the bovine Einstein but that Veronika is being kept as a pet,” Dr. Auersperg said. She lives in a stimulating, rich environment, rather than on a factory farm, and has already celebrated her 13th birthday, a milestone that many cows never reach. “She has the opportunity to interact with her environment and to learn about her environment, and that is perhaps the greatest difference,” Dr. Auersperg said.
Dr. Auersperg studies animal innovation or, as she describes it, “how animals invent new solutions to problems.” Sometimes, those solutions involve deploying tools, an ability that requires sophisticated thinking and has been documented in relatively few animals, including chimpanzees, elephants, crows, dolphins and octopuses.
But after Dr. Auersperg published a book on animal innovation last year, she began to hear from people wondering whether a particular behavior they had observed in their pets or local wildlife might qualify as tool use. Scientifically, most of these examples were of little interest. (A cat curling up in an Amazon box does not qualify as tool use.)
But one video caught her eye. A filmmaker scouting for locations had captured footage of Veronika using an old, battered rake to scratch her back. “It seemed very goal-directed and targeted,” Dr. Auersperg recalled.
Dr. Auersperg and one of the postdoctoral researchers in her lab quickly connected with Veronika’s owner: Witgar Wiegele, a farmer who ran a grain mill and bakery. “Witgar immediately invited us for cake, and he gave us lots of bread to eat, and he told us about his cow,” Dr. Auersperg said.
Mr. Wiegele told the researchers that he had never taught Veronika to use tools. But about a decade ago, he said, he had begun to notice her picking up sticks and using them to scratch herself. Over the years, her technique had improved, he added.
To probe Veronika’s abilities, the researchers decided to present her with a deck-cleaning broom, with stiff bristles attached to a long wooden handle.
“A broom has a functional end and a nonfunctional end,” said Antonio Osuna-Mascaró, the postdoctoral researcher who collaborated with Dr. Auersperg on the study. The scientists hypothesized that Veronika would primarily scratch herself with the functional, or bristled, end of the tool.
Last summer, the researchers repeatedly placed the broom on the ground in front of Veronika. She readily picked it up, using her tongue to grab onto the handle, securing it with her teeth and then aiming the broom somewhere at the back half of her body. Over the course of 70 trials, conducted over multiple days, she used the broom to scratch herself 76 times, the researchers found.
The goal of the behavior, the scientists believe, was to soothe itching and irritation caused by bites from horseflies, which seemed to be everywhere during the summer testing sessions. “So for her, using this tool to scratch herself was something that she was really, really looking for,” Dr. Osuna-Mascaró said.
As the scientists predicted, Veronika mostly scratched herself with the bristled end of the broom, rubbing it back and forth across her body. But from time to time, she also poked at herself with the broom’s wooden handle in what the researchers initially assumed were mistakes. “We thought at the beginning that perhaps Veronika was not careful enough when choosing which end to use against her body,” Dr. Osuna-Mascaró said.
But over time, the scientists came to recognize a pattern.
When Veronika scratched the thick, tough skin along her back, she tended to use the bristled end of the broom. But when she targeted her underside, like her udder or her belly flaps, she tended to use the wooden handle of the broom to gently prod and push the softer, more sensitive skin that covered those areas.
“She was using a way more careful approach,” Dr. Osuna-Mascaró said. “It wasn’t an error. It was a meaningful use of the handle end of the tool.”
It appears to be a clear-cut case of animal tool use, said Christian Nawroth, who studies farm animal cognition at the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology in Germany. “It looks very convincing,” said Dr. Nawroth, who was not involved in the research.
Dr. Nawroth said he hoped that the study, which is part of a small but growing body of literature on farm animal cognition, might prompt people to reflect on their perceptions of farm animals.
“We know that they have emotions,” he said, “that they have sophisticated problem-solving behavior.” But, he added, “there is apparently still this big mismatch of what we anticipate that these animals can do and what they actually do.”
Although Veronika’s life has been somewhat unusual, there have been anecdotal reports of other cows with similar skills, and Dr. Osuna-Mascaró has found online videos of other cows and bulls seeming to use branches to scratch themselves. Some of those apparent tool users were Brahman bulls, members of a different cattle species that originated in Asia and diverged from European cattle half a million years ago. That suggests that the ability to use tools “is something that lays really deep within the nature of these animals,” Dr. Osuna-Mascaró said.
“We haven’t been looking well enough at these animals,” Dr. Auersperg added, noting that humans have been living in proximity to cows for thousands of years. “Perhaps the absurd thing was not the absurdity of a cow using tools, but the absurdity of us never thinking that a cow might be intelligent.”
Emily Anthes is a science reporter, writing primarily about animal health and science. She also covered the coronavirus pandemic.
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