Skip to content
  • Happy Health
  • Happy Mindset
  • Animal Wonders
  • About Us
    • Team
  • Subscribe
Menu
  • Happy Health
  • Happy Mindset
  • Animal Wonders
  • About Us
    • Team
  • Subscribe
Happy News

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

PrevPreviousAn iPhone Photo Solved A 60 Year Botanical Mystery
NextFish Communication Finally Understood By HumansNext

Recent Articles

Happy News

Scientists May Have Finally “Seen” Dark Matter

May 9, 2026

For nearly a century, dark matter has been one of the greatest mysteries in all of science. We know it exists as it makes up an estimated 85% of the universe’s total mass and acts as invisible gravitational scaffolding holding galaxies together, but no one has ever directly observed it.

Read More
Happy News

Coral Reefs Are Hiding An Almost Entirely Unstudied Universe Of Potential Medicine

May 9, 2026

Scientists at the University of Galway and an international consortium have discovered that coral reefs contain an almost entirely unstudied universe of microbial life, publishing a study in Nature that reconstructed the genomes of 645 microbial species from 99 coral reefs across 32 Pacific islands, with more than 99 percent

Read More
Happy News

A Rare Superbloom Is Turning Part Of Redwood National Park Purple And There Are Only Weeks To See It

May 9, 2026

Something extraordinary and fleeting is happening right now in Northern California, where the Bald Hills grasslands above the redwood canopy in Redwood National Park have erupted into a rare lupine superbloom, turning a stretch of elevated landscape off a remote road near Orick into a sweeping sea of purple, blue,

Read More
« Previous Next »
  • Privacy Notice
  • Accessibility Notice
  • Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
  • Unsubscribe
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Privacy Policy
  • Privacy Notice
  • Accessibility Notice
  • Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
  • Unsubscribe
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Privacy Policy
Copyright © 2026 HappyNews.