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Cows Are Even Smarter Than We Thought

Veronika the cow has amazed researchers by using a broom to scratch specific areas of her body demonstrating tool use, a skill that was not previously known to be possessed by cattle and calling into question the previous assessment of the cognitive abilities of these farm animals. Study leader Alice Auersperg told the Keystone SDA news agency that for a long time it was virtually automatically assumed that cows were stupid, but the study published Monday in the journal Current Biology has shaken the common mockery of the stupid cow. The researcher traveled with her postdoctoral fellow Antonio Osuna Mascaro to the small mountain community in Carinthia Austria where Veronika lives thinking it might take a day or two to see this behavior, but they walked into that pasture and within seconds Veronika picked up a stick with her tongue, held it in her mouth, and started scratching herself with it. In one experiment the researchers gave Veronika a broom and she used the bristle end of the brush for the upper thicker skinned areas of her body such as her back, while for more sensitive lower areas such as her udder or skin flaps on her belly she used the smooth end of the handle showing remarkable flexibility.

This differentiated approach is referred to in the study as multi purpose tool use, and according to the research such behavior in which different properties of a single object are used for different functions has so far only been consistently documented in a comparable way in chimpanzees. Veronika is a 13 year old Braunvieh cow, one of thousands that can be found in Swiss barns and pastures, who is kept as a pet rather than for agricultural production and began picking up fallen branches and scratching herself with them on her own at the age of three or four. The case of Veronika does not prove that all cows use tools but it does show that cattle may have the cognitive prerequisites for doing so, with Auersperg explaining that in conventional farming which often offers little incentive this potential probably remains hidden and proving that the cognitive abilities of farm animals have hardly been studied despite how prevalent they are in our environment.

Source: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/research-frontiers/swiss-funded-study-finds-cows-are-smarter-than-originally-thought/90804976

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