Gary Larson Was Right

Cows got tools!

More specifically, a cow in Switzerland (because, of course, Switzerland) has been documented using tools.

Scientists have been forced to rethink the intelligence of cattle after an Austrian cow named Veronika displayed an impressive – and until now undocumented – knack for tool use.

Witgar Wiegele, an organic farmer and baker from a small town in Carinthia near the Italian border, keeps Veronika as a pet and noticed that she occasionally played with sticks and used them to scratch her body.

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Word soon got around and before long a video clip of the cow’s behaviour reached biologists in Vienna who specialise in animal intelligence. They immediately grasped the importance of the footage. “It was a cow using an actual tool,” said Dr Antonio Osuna Mascaró at the city’s University of Veterinary Medicine. “We got everything ready and jumped in the car to visit.” 

I have this image of one of the lab coated biologists running into the room shouting, "Road Trip!!!" 

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Armed with a deck brush, Osuna Mascaró and his colleague Alice Auersperg set about testing Veronika’s skills. Through a series of field trials, the brown Swiss proved she could not only pick up the broom, but wield it according to the job at hand. If the broom was at an awkward angle, Veronika used her tongue to reposition it before clamping it in place with her teeth.

Veronika favoured the bristled end of the broom to scratch the tough skin on her back. But she switched to the smooth handle and scratched more gently when the itch was on more delicate, lower body areas such as her udders and belly, according to the study in Current Biology.

“At the beginning I thought this was the result of a mistake. Perhaps Veronika was not careful enough when selecting her tool for self-scratching,” Osuna Mascaró said. “But after a while we started to observe a pattern: Veronika indeed had a preference for using the broom end, but when she used the handle end she was doing so in a meaningful way.”

Tool use is well known in chimps, crows, dolphins and even octopuses. The latter have been filmed throwing shells at one another. But livestock have never been considered the sharpest of animals. Gary Larson’s 1982 Far Side cartoon, Cow Tools, shows a cow standing behind a table of oddly shaped objects. It confused scores of readers, including Larson’s mother, prompting him to explain: “While I have never met a cow who could make tools, I felt sure that if I did, they (the tools) would lack something in sophistication and resemble the sorry specimens shown.”

I, for one, welcome our new bovine overlords.