Cows like to have their backs scratched, and for that, they rub themselves against trees, fences, and bristle posts that farmers put up. In some cases, people will scratch the cows for them. However, Veronika takes a different approach.
Veronika, a 13-year-old Swiss Brown cow in southern Austria, is able to use tools to scratch her back. She does this by picking up sticks, rakes, or brushes, putting them in her mouth, and using them to reach and scratch different parts of her body. As well as this, when she is given a rake brush, she is able to use either side of the brush to scratch herself, depending on which area of her body she is targeting. Veronika was not trained to do this, which makes her the first observed cow to practice “embodied tooling,” which is using a tool on her body.
To see Veronika for themselves, Alice Auersperg and Antonio Osuna-Mascaro from the University of Veterinary Medicine traveled to Nötsch. There, they met Veronika’s owner, Witgar Wiegele, who keeps her as a pet. Wiegele noticed that when Veronika was around 4 years old, she sometimes picked up sticks.
“I was naturally amazed,” Wiegele said. “She enjoys being petted, and conversations. She recognizes my and my mother’s voices from afar and hurries over, calling out to greet us.”
To understand this behavior, Auersperg and Osuna-Mascaro conducted a series of trials, which involved placing a deck in front of Veronika in a random orientation. After around 70 trials, they noticed how Veronika positioned the stick in her mouth before securing it in her teeth. They also noticed that Veronika used different parts of the same tool for different purposes. She used the bristled end of the brush to forcefully scratch her upper body, while she used the smooth end to more gently rub the sensitive skin on her udder and belly flap. The researchers said that this was a potential sign of higher cognition and that this discovery suggests we underestimate the cognitive ability of cattle.
“Veronika does not belong to one of those exotic species that we would normally look for tool use in,” Auersperg said. Cows are “this livestock species that’s been domesticated for 10,000 years. They are everywhere around us. We just assume they must be stupid because of them being a livestock animal.”
Adding on, “we have no proof whatsoever that cows are stupid animals. To have the capacity for this behavior go unobserved may have something to do with the way these animals are kept around us”.
Perhaps, by giving cows the freedom to explore, we could see more of them using tools like Veronika.
