\n<\/p>\n
Scientists have been forced to rethink the intelligence of cattle after an Austrian cow named Veronika displayed an impressive \u2013 and until now undocumented \u2013 knack for tool use.<\/p>\n
Witgar Wiegele, an organic farmer and baker from a small town in Carinthia near the Italian border, keeps Veronika as a pet and noticed that she occasionally played with sticks and used them to scratch her body.<\/p>\n
Wiegele said Veronika began playing with pieces of wood years ago, then worked out how to scratch herself with sticks. He said she also recognised family members\u2019 voices and hurried to meet them when they called.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was naturally amazed by her extraordinary intelligence and thought how much we could learn from animals: patience, calmness, contentment, and gentleness,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Word soon got around and before long a video clip of the cow\u2019s behaviour reached biologists in Vienna who specialise in animal intelligence. They immediately grasped the importance of the footage. \u201cIt was a cow using an actual tool,\u201d said Dr Antonio Osuna Mascar\u00f3 at the city\u2019s University of Veterinary Medicine. \u201cWe got everything ready and jumped in the car to visit.\u201d<\/p>\n
Veronika\u2019s home town, N\u00f6tsch im Gailtal, is \u201cstraight out of the Sound of Music\u201d with green forests, blue lakes, mountains and a church and school near Veronika\u2019s meadow, Osuna Mascar\u00f3 said, adding: \u201cIt\u2019s the most idyllic place imaginable for an Austrian cow.\u201d<\/p>\n
Armed with a deck brush, Osuna Mascar\u00f3 and his colleague Alice Auersperg set about testing Veronika\u2019s skills. Through a series of field trials, the brown Swiss proved she could not only pick up the broom, but wield it according to the job at hand. If the broom was at an awkward angle, Veronika used her tongue to reposition it before clamping it in place with her teeth.<\/p>\n
Veronika the cow scratches her back <\/span>Veronika the cow scratches her back.<\/span><\/p>\n Veronika favoured the bristled end of the broom to scratch the tough skin on her back. But she switched to the smooth handle and scratched more gently when the itch was on more delicate, lower body areas such as her udders and belly, according to the study in Current Biology.<\/p>\n \u201cAt the beginning I thought this was the result of a mistake. Perhaps Veronika was not careful enough when selecting her tool for self-scratching,\u201d Osuna Mascar\u00f3 said. \u201cBut after a while we started to observe a pattern: Veronika indeed had a preference for using the broom end, but when she used the handle end she was doing so in a meaningful way.\u201d<\/p>\n Tool use is well known in chimps, crows, dolphins and even octopuses. The latter have been filmed throwing shells at one another. But livestock have never been considered the sharpest of animals. Gary Larson\u2019s 1982 Far Side cartoon, Cow Tools, shows a cow standing behind a table of oddly shaped objects. It confused scores of readers, including Larson\u2019s mother, prompting him to explain: \u201cWhile I have never met a cow who could make tools, I felt sure that if I did, they (the tools) would lack something in sophistication and resemble the sorry specimens shown.\u201d<\/p>\n Veronika is far from making even misshapen tools, but her prowess in using them has impressed nonetheless. Over seven sessions of 10 trials, the researchers witnessed 76 instances of tool use as she grabbed the broom to scratch otherwise unreachable regions. Using both ends of the brush counts as multi-purpose tool use, the scientists say, which is extraordinarily rare. Beyond humans, it has only been shown convincingly in chimpanzees.<\/p>\n It is unclear how Veronika acquired her skills, but circumstances have been in her favour. Few cows reach her age of 13 years old, or live in such a stimulating environment. That said, the researchers believe cattle may simply be smarter than people have previously realised. Since the study, Osuna Mascar\u00f3 said other clever cows have come to light. \u201cWe don\u2019t believe that Veronika is the Einstein of cows,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat this tells us is that cows have the potential to innovate tool use, and we have ignored this fact for thousands of years,\u201d he added. \u201cIt\u2019s shocking that we\u2019re only discovering this now.\u201d<\/p>\n There is no suggestion that Veronika\u2019s skills are evidence of the evolution of an ominous new species of super-cow. As the scientists write in the study: \u201cShe did not fashion tools like the cow in Gary Larson\u2019s cartoon, but she selected, adjusted and used one with notable dexterity and flexibility. Perhaps the real absurdity lies not in imagining a tool-using cow, but in assuming such a thing could never exist.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Scientists have been forced to rethink the intelligence of cattle after an Austrian cow named Veronika displayed an impressive \u2013 and until now undocumented \u2013 knack for tool use. Witgar Wiegele, an organic farmer and baker from a small town in Carinthia near the Italian border, keeps Veronika as a pet and noticed that she<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42140,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[3846,22291,3555,22292,10097,1443,4763,19840,384],"class_list":{"0":"post-42139","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-animal","9":"tag-backscratching","10":"tag-behaviour","11":"tag-bovine","12":"tag-cows","13":"tag-intelligence","14":"tag-leads","15":"tag-reassess","16":"tag-scientists"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42139\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/42140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}