No wonder cow milk tastes so good! 😊
"About a decade ago, a baker in a small mountainous village in southern Austria noticed his cow doing something unusual. When Veronika had an itch, she would grab a stick in her mouth and use it to scratch her body. Over the years, the brown bovid’s technique improved. She could pick up objects as large as a broom or rake and move them around with her prehensile tongue, changing their length and orientation to ensure the best possible scratch.
The behavior isn’t just a clever trick: It’s the first documented case of tool use in cattle, scientists report today in Current Biology. And, it turns out, one of Veronika’s skills has only been seen in humans and chimpanzees. ..."
From the abstract:
"Imagine the tools a cow would make. This idea, humorously illustrated in Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoon, captures a widespread assumption: cows are neither problem-solvers nor tool users.
In science, as in culture, livestock species are often cognitively underestimated 😊, reinforced by their utilitarian role and persistent mind-denial biases associated with meat consumption.
Despite over 10,000 years of domestication, research on cattle cognition remains scarce and confined to applied contexts such as productivity and welfare.
Tool use, while rarely observed, offers a stringent test of cognitive flexibility. Defined as the manipulation of an external object to achieve a goal via a mechanical interface, tooling ranges from species-typical routines to innovative, problem-specific acts.
We report here our experimental demonstration of flexible egocentric tooling in a pet cow (Bos taurus), Veronika, who uses a deck brush to self-scratch. Across randomized trials, she preferred the bristled end but switched to the stick end when targeting softer lower-body areas. This adaptive deployment of tool features reveals multi-purpose tool use not previously reported in non-primate mammals. Our findings broaden the taxonomic scope of flexible tool use and invite a reassessment of livestock cognition."
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