A cow with a broom, and a rule for which end goes where
Veronika, a 13-year-old Swiss Brown cow (Braunvieh) kept as a family pet in the mountain village of Nötsch im Gailtal, Austria, picks up a deck broom with her mouth and uses it like two separate tools. The bristle end goes on her back and flanks, where the hide is thick. The wooden handle goes on her belly and udder, where the skin is thin. Cognitive biologists Alice Auersperg and Antonio Osuna-Mascaró, of the Comparative Cognition group at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, ran controlled trials, scrambling which end of the broom faced her before each attempt. Over seven sessions of ten trials each, seventy trials in total, they recorded 76 instances of Veronika picking up and using the broom deliberately, a small mismatch between the trial count and the tally of uses that the researchers themselves note. Either way, she matched the end to the body part almost every single time. Outside chimpanzees, the researchers say, this kind of “multipurpose tool use,” using two different features of one object for two different jobs, had not been reliably documented in any species but humans.
Doing it with your mouth changes everything
No hands means the whole broom gets handled by tongue and lips, and researchers watched Veronika’s stroke style change with the tool end: broad, loose sweeps when the bristles hit tough hide, tighter and more careful motion when the handle reached her udder. Osuna-Mascaró describes this as anticipation, not luck: she adjusts grip and movement before contact, compensating for a mouth doing a job hands usually do. An animal that stumbles into a good scratch does not recalibrate its stroke for skin sensitivity. Doing that consistently, across trials where the researchers randomized the broom’s orientation each time, is a different behavior than an accident that happened to feel good.
Why “just scratching herself” is the hard part
Tool use aimed at your own body usually gets filed as the easy category in cognition research, called egocentric tool use, precisely because there is no external object or environment to track, just skin and an itch. The paper Osuna-Mascaró and Auersperg published in Current Biology argues that filing system was too neat. Switching between two functions of one object, on cue, depending on where the itch sits, is the sophisticated part, whether the target is her own back or a termite mound. Wild chimpanzees, the paper notes, do something structurally similar: the thick end of a stick punches a hole in a termite nest, the thin end fishes the insects back out. “This was not accidental,” Auersperg has said of the footage that started the project. “This was a meaningful example of tool use in a species that is rarely considered from a cognitive perspective.”
The myth this kills
Cattle have long sat outside the short list of animals credited with flexible tool use, chimpanzees, certain corvids, orcas, the odd insect. Cows get grazing, not cognition. Christian Nawroth, a researcher not involved in the study, calls it, to his knowledge, the first successful demonstration of tool use in a farm animal, and argues that people consistently underestimate how sophisticated farm animals’ engagement with their surroundings actually is. Jan Langbein, an applied ethologist at the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology, called Veronika’s broom-switching an outstanding example of tool use in cattle. Nobody had run an experiment like this on a cow before Auersperg and Osuna-Mascaró; the study’s authors and outside experts both frame that as a gap in what researchers thought to look for, not a gap in what cows can do.
What the researchers don’t know yet
Is this a Veronika thing or a cow thing? The paper does not answer that, and the authors are not pretending to. Veronika has spent thirteen years surrounded by unusually close human contact and a wide variety of objects to handle, an environment almost no farmed cow ever gets. That could mean the ability is latent in cattle generally, waiting for the right circumstances to surface. It could also mean she is a one-off, shaped by an unusual life. Osuna-Mascaró says the team suspects this may be more widespread than documented, and is asking anyone who has watched a cow or bull use a stick or other handheld object with apparent purpose to get in touch. Currently, the working sample size for this exact behavior is one cow.
The farmer noticed first
Long before any university got involved, Witgar Wiegele, an organic farmer and baker, had already watched his family’s pet cow pick up branches to scratch herself, a habit he first noticed about nine years before the study appeared, and kept watching for years after that. No trials, no randomized orientations, just a man noticing his cow doing something odd, again and again. It was footage of that habit that eventually brought Auersperg and Osuna-Mascaró to his barn. Veronika didn’t make them wait: Wiegele handed her a stick, and within five minutes she was using it. Osuna-Mascaró later said the two of them nearly fell over watching. The science followed the anecdote, the way it usually does when nobody thought to look in the first place.