Daily Dot: How Now, Brown Tool-Using Cow?

Dear Reader,

Dot has long loved Gary Larson’s The Far Side, and one of my favorite comics features three panels in which a group of cows (click here, scroll down) stand on two legs with one acting a lookout. “Car,” says the scout and the bovines fall to four legs as a vehicle speeds past, after which they resume their biped stance. I adore Larson’s intimation that cows are smarter than we gave them credit for — that they have alternate lives of sophistication and complexity.

Turns out Larson was onto something. Veronika is a family pet, a long-lived Swiss Brown cow who belongs to Austrian organic farmer Witgar Wiegele. Wiegele had noticed in the past that Veronika would pick up sticks and use them to scratch herself. A recorded video of Veronika giving herself a good scratch came to the attention of Alice Auersperg, a cognitive biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna. “When I saw the footage, it was immediately clear that this was not accidental,” Auersperg told a reporter. “This was a meaningful example of tool use in a species that is rarely considered from a cognitive perspective.” Auersperg, fascinated, wanted to see how Veronika might use other tools made available to her. The cow picked up a deck brush, no doubt more effective than a stick, to give her backside a good scratch. The only person not surprised at Veronika’s ingenuity was Wiegele. And perhaps Gary Larson. 

Auersperg suggested that “the findings highlight how assumptions about livestock intelligence may reflect gaps in observation rather than genuine cognitive limits.” In other words, cows have probably always been demonstrating intelligence. Most of us just haven’t been paying attention.

(Ready to mooo-ve meat off your plate? Check out Bluedot’s Cheat Sheet for Less Meat.) 

Amoooosedly,

Dot

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