Cows Use Tools
looorg writes:
Humans use tools, it's one of the things that make us great. Some of the other smarter monkeys also use tools. Next up we have Cows. Cow tool users. Beware the bovine master race ... also lactose tolerant.
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.
[...] 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-Mascaro, a post-doctoral researcher at the same University, drove to Veronika's home.
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.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/cow-using-tools
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