After more than forty years, a bizarre panel from “The Far Side” comic strip has finally become prophecy. The cartoon depicts a strangely eye-less, bipedal cow standing in front of a bench of oddly-shaped objects, with the caption “Cow tools,” and no further context.
The “joke” — that cows are too stupid to make practical tools? — landed so flat that the cartoonist Gary Larson issued a public statement explaining it after readers swamped newspapers with confused inquiries after it ran.
Larson probably couldn’t predict that “Cow tools” would become a cultish internet meme decades later, serving for those in the know as an endearing icon of anti-humor — with such a heavy emphasis on the “anti” part that it borders on avant-garde art.
Similarly, the storied cartoonist probably never anticipated that “Cow tools” would turn out to be a real phenomenon.
You heard that right. In a new study published in the journal Current Biology, scientists say they’ve documented the first ever verified case of a bovine using a tool, suggesting we’ve been seriously underestimating the intelligence of these gentle creatures.
In footage shared by the researchers, the cow named Veronika holds a lengthy broom handle in her mouth and manipulates it to scratch herself, displaying impressive dexterity as she reaches everywhere on her body from her stomach to her rear end.
The feat is clearly no fluke, and remarkably, Veronika had received no training.
“[Veronika] did not fashion tools like the cow in Gary Larson’s cartoon, but she selected, adjusted, and used one with notable dexterity and flexibility,” the researchers wrote in the study. “Perhaps the real absurdity lies not in imagining a tool-using cow, but in assuming such a thing could never exist.”
The authors highlight how astonishingly little research has been done to explore the cognitive abilities of cows and other cattle. As author Alice Auersperg, a cognitive biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, put it, the “findings highlight how assumptions about livestock intelligence may reflect gaps in observation rather than genuine cognitive limits,” she said in a statement about the work.
Veronika is a Swiss Brown cow and was raised by a farmer in Austria, who starting ten years ago began to notice that the creature would sometimes pick up sticks on her own to scratch herself. After a video taken of Veronika’s shrewd habits caught the researcher’s attention, they immediately traveled to the farm to study her closely, performing controlled trials in which they carefully observed and recorded her habits.
The findings were stunning. They found that Veronika would consistently target specific body parts, and that she generally preferred using the brush end of the stick to scratch herself — except when she scratched more sensitive regions of her body, when she instead favored the smooth end. In further evidence of the cow’s deliberate control, she used wide, forceful movements to scratch her upper body, while soothing her lower-body with slower and more controlled ones. This demonstrates “genuinely flexible tool use,” lead author Antonio Osuna-Mascaró, a researcher at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, said in the statement, as well as the ability to anticipate the “outcome of her actions and adjusting her grip and movements accordingly.”
Tool use was once considered the hallmark of human intelligence, but that notion has firmly been debunked, challenging a narrower understanding of what intelligence is. Some chimpanzees, for example, use sticks to extract termites from trees. Crows, too, are frequently observed using twigs to reach their grub.
That said, tool usage is rarely observed in the wild, and it’s even more rare to see it used in a “flexible,” multi-purpose manner.
“Because she is using the tool on her own body, this represents an egocentric form of tool use, which is generally considered less complex than tool use directed at external objects,” said Osuna-Mascaró. “At the same time, she faces clear physical constraints, as she must manipulate tools with her mouth.”
While Veronika’s skills are stunning, she probably isn’t an singularly intelligent cow — which is encouraging to scientists. “We know more about the tool use of exotic animals on remote islands than we do about the cows we live with,” Osuna-Mascaró told CNN in an interview. Now, at least, we’re “starting to be sensitive enough to observe them.”
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