Cow Tools

A cow named Veronika demonstrates sophisticated tool use

- Kate Wong

IN NEWS THAT IS SURE TO DELIGHT fans of a certain Gary Larson cartoon turned meme about the limitations of bovine cognition, cow tools are real.

Larson's 1982 comic for his series The Far Side showed a cow standing behind a table bearing an array of oddly shaped objects. The text below the image read simply “cow tools.” Now a pet cow named Veronika has been documented not only wielding a tool but doing so in a surprisingly sophisticated way. The observation adds a new species to the growing list of creatures that have been found to use external objects to achieve a goal. It also hints that society has been underestimating the minds of farm animals.

The story begins more than a decade ago in the small Austrian town of Nötsch im Gailtal, where organic farmer and baker Witgar Wiegele first saw his family’s pet Swiss Brown cow, Veronika, pick up sticks and use them to scratch herself. When cognitive biologist Alice M. I. Auersperg of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna watched a video recording of Veronika’s behavior, “it was immediately clear that this was not accidental,” she said in a statement.

Auersperg and her colleague Antonio J. Osuna-Mascaró, a postdoctoral researcher at the same institution, visited Veronika and her human family, who welcomed the researchers with freshly baked bread and apple strudel. “Not only does Witgar prepare and sell bread, he also distributes it around the area. It was interesting to see Veronika watching every passing car with interest and trying to guess if the driver was Witgar. If she thought it was him, she would moo with all her might.”