Veronika, a cow in an Austrian mountain village, has astonished scientists by using sticks, rakes and brooms as multipurpose tools, a behaviour previously documented only in chimpanzees.
Humans have kept cattle for more than 10,000 years. In that time, they have lived alongside cows through every conceivable season and circumstance. They have observed them carefully, written about them, painted them and studied them in controlled experiments. And then Veronika, a cow in a mountain village in Austria, demonstrated something that none of that observation had ever documented before.
Veronika had taught herself to scratch using sticks, rakes and brooms found around her farm. This alone would be unusual. What caught the attention of animal intelligence specialists at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, when word eventually reached them, was the sophistication of her technique. She was using both ends of the same object for different purposes. For her back and harder-to-reach areas, she favoured the bristle end of a broom. For her underbelly and more sensitive spots, she used the handle.
Dr Antonio Osuna-Mascaro, who led the investigation, described the team’s reaction in stark terms. They were not expecting cows to use tools. They were even less expecting a cow to use a tool as a multipurpose tool, applying different parts of the same implement to different tasks depending on the surface being scratched. Until Veronika, this pattern of behaviour had only been consistently documented in chimpanzees.
The discovery raises questions about animal cognition that go beyond Veronika herself. If one cow in one Austrian village has developed this behaviour through her own observation and problem-solving, what might be happening elsewhere, unobserved? How much of animal intelligence goes unnoticed because the conditions that reveal it are rare, or because the humans present do not recognise what they are seeing?
Cattle are social animals with complex communication, clear individual personalities and the ability to recognise human faces and remember previous interactions. Research over the past two decades has steadily expanded the scientific understanding of their cognitive and emotional lives. Veronika adds another dimension to that expanding picture.
She lives in her mountain village, has developed her technique over years and continues to refine it. She has no idea that she has astonished anyone. She is simply solving the problem of where she is itchy, with the tools that happen to be available.
Source: Rest Less