I have a farmer friend who regularly regales me with colourful stories of her cattle. Take the time when a beef cow called Noisette used her tongue to pull back the catch on the door of her pen so she could steal cattle nuts from the nearby feed bin. Or the time when she did it again, not to let herself out, but seemingly to stand back and watch as her freed compatriots “mooched around and caused mayhem.”
Where others see a herd of cows standing around looking bored, my friend sees a soap opera, with characters and plot twists. Cows, she tells me, learn quickly, bore easily and have an indefatigable penchant for mischief.
So when news broke of a cow called Veronika who uses a broom to scratch her butt, my friend was nonplussed. “I don’t think many dairy farmers would be surprised to learn that,” she says.
Writing in the journal Current Biology, researchers from the University of Veterinary Medicine in Austria described how Veronika, a 13-year-old brown Swiss pet cow, picks up the broom with her tongue then twists around and uses it to scratch the bits of her body she could otherwise not reach. The blunt end of the broom is used for the sensitive skin on her belly, while the bristly end is reserved for the thicker skin on her upper back and buttocks.
It is, the authors say, not just the first time that tool use has been officially documented in cattle, but the first sign that cattle can flexibly use tools in a multi-purpose manner. Veronika elevated a humble back yard brush to the status of a Swiss army knife. Managed deftly in her mouth, the implement was both belly gadget and buttock gizmo.
The reaction was one of surprise, but it shouldn’t be. We consistently underestimate the abilities of non-human animals, even when the evidence is all around.
Front loop cow
Tool use is said to occur when an animal deliberately manipulates an object to achieve a particular goal. So when my dog scratches his back by rolling around on the frosty ground, it’s adorable – but it’s not tool use. The dog moves. The ground doesn’t. When he brings me a ball because he wants to play, an object is being manipulated, but the dog’s not doing the throwing. Instead, he has learned that I will.
For a long time, tool use was thought to be a uniquely human behaviour. Then in the 1960s, primatologist Jane Goodall witnessed a wild chimpanzee strip leaves from a twig, stick it into a termite mound, then pull it out and eat the insects that were clinging to it. Since then, many more examples of animal tool use have been documented. Sea otters use stones, both as hammers to dislodge molluscs anchored to the sea floor and as anvils to help break the shells open. In Senegal, chimps sharpen the ends of sticks to make spears, which they use to stab sleeping bush babies. New Caledonian crows fashion exquisite hooks from plant stems, which they use to extract larvae from logs.
Less dextrous but no less impressive, polar bears are believed to smack walruses round the head with rocks, octopuses take pot shots at each other with shells, while “firehawk” raptors have been spotted picking up burning sticks from wildfires and then dropping them elsewhere to ignite fresh fires. The “firehawks” then feast on the animals that flee.
One by one, features that we once thought of as uniquely human, such as tool use, complex communication, the ability to count and culture, topple like dominos.
But still, we prefer to maintain the illusion of our supposed superiority. I think the story of Veronika tells us less about the minds of cows, and more about the minds of people. We have become so blind that we fail to see how animals are both smarter and more like us than we give them credit for. My farmer friend, however, has her eyes wide open. She has spent years working with and caring for animals. She has watched their behaviour and has no doubt that these are complex creatures, with rich inner lives. She’s right, of course.
After Goodall reported chimpanzee tool use, it prompted the British palaeoanthropologist Louis Leakey to write, “Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as human.” I have a fourth suggestion. We don’t need to accept cows as human, but we do need to get off our high horses and accept that we are not that special. Cows, on the other hand, are.
