In 1960, when she was studying chimpanzees in Tanzania, the primatologist Jane Goodall observed one chimp strip a stick of its leaves and use it to extract termites from a mound. She telegraphed her observation to her supervisor, the paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey.
“Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man’ or accept chimpanzees as human,” Leakey replied.
More than six decades later, another such moment has arrived — this time with an unlikely protagonist: Veronika, a cow in Austria.
A cow uses a tool
University of Veterinary Medicine, Austria, cognitive biologist and associate professor Alice Auersperg first learnt of Veronika in a video she received. It purported to show “a cow using a stick-like object to scratch her body in a way that did not appear accidental,” she recalled. She forwarded the clip to her colleague Antonio J. Osuna Mascaró.
Both researchers study how animals perceive, learn, remember, solve problems, and make decisions. They recognised that Veronika’s actions were “not a case of simple rubbing against objects,” Dr. Osuna-Mascaró said. Instead, the cow appeared to be “actively manipulating an object, orienting it, and using it to reach specific body parts.”
In other words, Veronika was demonstrating “genuine tool use”, something that had not been previously reported in cattle.
Still, the team was cautious. “Most claims of animal tool use do not survive careful scrutiny,” Dr. Osuna-Mascaró explained. This is because scientists consider an animal’s interaction with objects to be tool use only when it uses its body to manipulate the object and achieve a goal. This is why dogs scratching against trees doesn’t count whereas chimpanzees fashioning spears out of sticks to hunt galagos does.
To check whether Veronika’s behaviour met this definition, the team travelled to Nötsch im Gailtal, the Austrian town where Veronika lived. If they could confirm their suspicions, Veronika’s tool use would prove “cattle possess more behavioural flexibility than they are usually credited with,” Dr. Auersperg said.
Scratch the itch
In Nötsch, the researchers designed an experiment to test Veronika’s abilities. They chose a wooden scrubbing brush with bristles at the end of a smooth, long handle and expected Veronika to (a) use the brush to scratch parts of her body that were otherwise hard to reach, and (b) show a preference for the bristled end.
In more than 70 instances, the team presented the brush to Veronika in different orientations — all to ensure her preference for one end couldn’t be explained by how the brush was positioned.
In almost every instance, Veronika lifted the brush with her tongue, held it between her teeth, and scratched the rear half of her body. And she used the bristled end more often.
Veronika’s behaviour was thus evidence of “goal-directed, context-sensitive tooling,” the team reported in a January 2026 Current Biology paper.
A surprise
There were, however, a small number of trials when Veronika used the handle. The team assumed these to be errors at first until they realised Veronika was “targeting different body areas with each end of the tool,” Dr. Osuna-Mascaró told this reporter.
Veronika was using the abrasive bristles to scratch the thick skin of her upper body. But when scratching the delicate skin of her lower body, such as her udders, she used the smooth handle-end.
The team also saw Veronika use different techniques with the two ends. When using the bristled end, she raised the brush, rested it at a spot on the skin, then pulled it forward in what the researchers dubbed a “scrubbing motion”. Her movements with the handle-end were however more precise and gentle “forward pushes”.
That Veronika wasn’t only using a tool but using it in different ways had the team surprised.
“It is astonishing to find that a cow has the capability to do something like this,” Dr. Osuna-Mascaró said.
Just noticing
Veronika’s abilities are rivalled so far only by one other animal species: chimpanzees.
In the 2000s, researchers described chimpanzees in Congo using one end of a stick to pierce termite mounds and using the other, frayed end to scoop the insects out.
Ideally, Veronika’s abilities shouldn’t surprise us: “Given that there are numerous instances where cows have been recorded to make use of their tongues … to open locks… it is not very surprising,” University of Hyderabad associate professor of neural and cognitive sciences Joby Joseph said. At the same time, he agreed that “very few study and report these behaviours [in cattle]”.
Primatologist Sindhu Radhakrishna, a professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, agreed. She added that Veronika’s tool-use challenges biologists to rethink why “they expect to see ‘higher’ cognition in some species but don’t expect to see it in others.”
According to Dr. Osuna-Mascaró, cattle are seen as less intelligent than they actually are for two reasons: “a lack of opportunity and observation,” and due to “anthropocentric and utilitarian assumptions about animal minds.”
Anthropocentrism is the belief that human beings are superior to all other life.
Animal farm
Unlike Veronika, who has access to open meadows and human interaction, most cattle spend their lives in “barren environments with limited opportunities to manipulate objects,” Dr. Osuna-Mascaró explained.
This means if farm animals were provided with richer environments, they could show more such behaviours. That, Dr. Osuna-Mascaró expressed hope, would ultimately force us to “reconsider how we treat them”.
In the end, the discovery perhaps speaks more about humans than cattle. Despite co-existing for about 10,000 years, it is only now that scientists are taking cows’ mental abilities seriously.
The real question then is “not whether cows can use tools, but why it took us so long to notice,” Dr. Osuna-Mascaró said.
Sayantan Datta is a faculty member at Krea University and an independent science journalist.
Published – February 16, 2026 05:30 am IST
