Veronika, a cow living in an idyllic mountain village in the Austrian countryside, has spent years perfecting the art of scratching herself with sticks, rakes, and deck brushes. Now that scientists have discovered her, she has the distinction of the first cow known to use tools.

She picks up objects with her tongue, grips them tight with her mouth, and directs their ends to where she wants them most. When she’s wielding a deck brush, she will use the bristled end to scratch her thick-skinned back, but switches to the smooth handle when scratching her soft, sensitive belly.

In a new study, published in the journal Current Biology, scientists from the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna analyzed Veronika’s behavior and concluded that it qualifies as a tool use. Despite roughly 10,000 years of humans living with cattle, this is the first time scientists have documented a cow using a tool.

The researchers say their discovery not only shows that cows are smarter than we think they are, but also that other cows could develop similar skills, given the chance.

Scratching an itch

The brown cow’s know-how came to the attention of scientists last year after Alice Auersperg, a cognitive biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, published a book on tool use in animals. Shortly after, her inbox was flooded with messages from people claiming to have seen their pets use tools. “I got all of those emails from people saying things like ‘my cat is using the Amazon box as a tool. It’s her new house,’” she says. Among these mundane reports was something truly new: a video of a cow picking up a rake and scratching her backside with it.

“It seemed really interesting,” she recalls. “We had to take a closer look.” Not long after, Auersperg and her colleague Antonio Osuna-Mascaró, a post-doctoral researcher at the same University, drove to Veronika’s home.

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To say Veronika was living her best life would be an understatement. Her owner, a soft-hearted baker named Witgar Wiegele, had kept Veronika and her mother as pets. She’d spent her life roaming around a picturesque pasture surrounded by forests and snow-covered mountains. Veronika, now 13 years old, has had many years to mess around with the many sticks and landscaping tools that line her enclosure.

The only downside to her idyllic lifestyle is that each summer, horse flies plague Wiegele’s property. According to the researchers, the desire to shoo these flies away and scratch their bites likely drove Veronika to develop her self-scratching skills.

After getting to know Veronika, the researchers conducted behavioral tests to determine if Veronika was truly a tool user. The definition of tool use “is very strict,” Auersperg says. To be considered a tool user, an animal must intentionally grasp an object and direct its functional end toward a target, creating a mechanical interaction that achieves a goal.

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A skilled brush user

To test Veronika’s skills, the researchers would place a deck brush on the ground near her in a random position and record which end Veronika grabbed and which part of her body she scratched. What the researchers saw took them by surprise.

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“Her tongue rolled out like a carpet,” says Auersperg. “The tip of her tongue was like a really dexterous index finger; it grabbed the stick in the middle and rolled it into her mouth. She held [the brush] very stably, turned her neck, and started scratching herself. It was really, really amazing.”

After dozens of tests, during which the researchers saw her use different ends of the brush, as well as different scratching styles, depending on which part of her body she was targeting, they concluded that her behavior was deliberate and controlled.

“There’s absolutely no question that this is tool use,” says Robert Shumaker, an evolutionary biologist and President of the Indianapolis Zoo. Shumaker, who recently co-authored a book on tool use in animals and was not involved with the new study, says he is excited to see cows added to the list of tool-using animals, but not surprised. Other domesticated hoofed mammals, such as water buffalo and goats, are known to use tools, so it makes sense, he says, that cows can too.

(Dolphins learn how to use tools from peers, just like great apes)

Veronika resting while using a stick.

Antonio J Osuna Mascaro

Leisure and learning

In 1982, cartoonist Gary Larson published a comic titled Cow Tools that depicted a cow standing beside a random assortment of useless objects. The joke hinged on the widespread belief that cows are simple creatures incapable of making or using tools.

This belief, while convenient for those who prefer to think of cows as unintelligent, is entirely misguided, says Osuna-Mascaró. “We don’t think that Veronica is the Einstein of cows; we think that her conditions are special enough for her to be able to express herself in a way that other cows simply can’t,” he says. “She has all the objects in the world to interact with and the time to learn how to use them.”

According to Wiegele, Veronika began scratching herself with sticks when she was only 3 years old. At first, she was clumsy, but over the past nine years, she has honed her skills and can now scratch with precision. Given the time and enriched environment Veronika was afforded, other cows would likely exhibit the same behavior, Osuna-Mascaró says.

Osuna-Mascaró also believes that there may be other species whose tool use has similarly flown under the radar. He invites anyone who has a report of animals using tools that haven’t previously been documented to email him. But please, do refrain from sending him anecdotes about your cats’ adeptness with cardboard boxes.