Veronika the cow has a scratching broom, and she knows how to use it
CBC
The second Antonio Osuna-Mascaró and Alice Auersperg saw a video of Veronika the cow scratching her backside with a branch, they knew they had to drop everything to go meet her.
The cognitive biologists from the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna have long been studying tool use among non-human animals, but they’d never seen it in a cow before.
“We jumped in the car immediately, and we drove for five hours to the south of Austria from Vienna to meet Veronika,” Osuna-Mascaró told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.
Veronika, he said, did not disappoint.
The researchers gave her a broom, and were blown away by how quickly and dexterously she made use of it, employing different techniques to relieve her various itches.
They say their findings, published in the journal Current Biology on Monday, upend long-held assumptions about the intelligence of cows.
Veronika is a 13-year-old brown Swiss cow who lives as a pet in the mountain village of Nötsch in southern Austria.
Her owner, Witgar Wiegele, first noticed her picking up branches and using them to scratch herself about nine years ago. Over the years, she learned to use short ones to relieve itches near her head, and long ones to get to those hard-to-reach places, Wiegele told the researchers.
Veronika wasted no time showing off her skills for the scientists. Within five minutes of their arrival last summer, Wiegele handed the cow a stick, and she got down to business.
“We almost fell on the ground,” Osuna-Mascaró said. “It was really, really impressive.”
The scientist wanted to test whether Veronika’s scratching met the criteria for “flexible tooling,” which is defined as using an object to extend one’s own body while applying mechanical force to a target.
So they gave her a broom.
“Because a broom,” Mascaró says, “has a functional end and a non-functional end.”
Not only did Veronika immediately show a preference for scratching with the bristled side of the broom, but she started figuring out different ways of using the tool to meet her varying needs.
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