This tool-using cow defies expectations for bovine braininess

A deck brush can be a good tool for the right task. Just ask Veronika, the Brown Swiss cow.

Veronika uses both ends of a deck brush to scratch various parts of her body, researchers report January 19 in Current Biology. It’s the first reported tool use in a cow, a species that is often “cognitively underestimated,” the researchers say. 

Cows usually rub against trees, rocks or wooden planks to scratch, but Veronika’s handy tool allows her to reach parts of her body that she couldn’t otherwise, says Antonio Osuna-Mascaró, a cognitive biologist at the Messerli Research Institute of the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna. It’s unclear how the cow figured it out, but “somehow Veronika learned to use tools, and she’s doing something that other cows simply can’t.”  

Veronika, a pet cow that lives in a pasture on a small Austrian farm, picks up the brush by its handle with her tongue and twists her neck to place the brush where she needs it. Setting the brush in front of her in different orientations showed that she uses the hard, bristled end to target most areas, including the tough, thick skin on her back. She also uses the nonbristled end, slowly moving the handle over softer body parts such as her belly button and udder. 

“At the beginning, I thought that it was a mistake” that Veronika was using the handle to scratch, Osuna-Mascaró says. “But after observing Veronika for a little while, it was so obvious that she was using both tool ends in different ways for targeting different body areas.”  

Manipulating one tool for multiple purposes has been seen consistently only in chimpanzees. 

“People are happy to acknowledge that dolphins and so on are extremely clever,” says Lindsay Matthews, an animal behaviorist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand who was not involved in the work. “But I believe most animals are extremely clever if they’re given the right task to do.” He, for instance, has potty-trained cows.

One clever tactic is that Veronika sometimes turns her head one way to use the brush end and the other way to use the stick end, Matthews says. “I thought it was very efficient not to have to regrip on the brush.” He thinks it would be interesting to test how she handles other implements, like one with brushes on both ends.

It is important to note that Veronika is just one cow, so not all cows may be tool users, says Alice Auersperg, a cognitive biologist also at Messerli. “This shows problem-solving ability dedicated to a specific problem, and in an animal that is not necessarily more intelligent than all other cows but that is kept completely different than we normally keep cows,” as a pet on a small farm, not an industrial-scale one. Veronika’s bucolic life may have given her the freedom to explore her environment and teach herself to use a tool.