Veronika the Cow Teaches Herself to Use a Tool
Veronika is a 13-year-old Swiss brown cow living with the Wiegele family in the mountain village of Nötsch in southern Austria. When she was about two years old, her owners noticed she would sometimes grab a stick in her mouth and use it to scratch her body.
A friend of the Wiegeles filmed the unusual behavior and sent the video to Alice Auersperg, cognitive biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna who had just published her first book, Erfindergeist der Tiere (“The Inventiveness of Animals”).
“When I saw the footage,” Auersperg recalls in a university press release, “I immediately thought: this is not just a curious behavior, this is a scientifically valuable example of a measurable tool used by a species that is traditionally overlooked in relation to its cognitive abilities.”
Auersperg went to Nötsch with colleague Antonio Osuna-Mascaró, where they ran Veronika through her paces. In a series of sessions, the bright bovine was given a deck brush (a stiff-bristled cleaning broom) placed horizontally on the ground. With little hesitation, Veronika would pick it up – grasping the handle with her tongue – and use it to scratch at places she could not otherwise reach.
To the surprise of the researchers, Veronika used distinct, task-specific techniques: broad, sweeping movements of the brush end of the stick on her back, but more delicate pokes with the other end when targeting her soft underbelly. This kind of complex reasoning has only been observed elsewhere in the animal kingdom in chimpanzees.
Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that a cow like Veronika would demonstrate complex intelligence usually associated with primates. Most cows do not reach her advanced age, living in an open meadow with daily, loving human contact – as a pet rather than an asset. The safe, rich environment likely created ideal conditions for Veronika’s behavior to emerge.
“This is not about claiming cows are smarter than we thought,” Auersperg adds. “It’s about recognizing that our assumptions about intelligence in animals are shaped by how we treat them.”
The researchers' findings are published in Current Biology. Watch Veronika in action here.
Photo credit: Antonio J. Osuna-Mascaró / Vetmeduni
