"Meet Veronika. The 13-year-old Swiss Brown cow lives in the village of Notsch at the foot of the Carinthia mountains in southern Austria. She's kept as a pet by a local farmer, and can roam her meadow to her heart's delight. Like many other pets, she likes to have her back scratched. If no friendly humans are around to do the job, that's not a problem Veronika uses a brush or stick to do it herself."
"She picks up objects like sticks, rakes, or brushes with her mouth and then uses them to reach and scratch various body areas. That makes Veronika the first cow to have been observed to practice "embodied tooling" using a tool on her own body. What's more, when presented with a deck brush, Veronika used both sides of it to scratch herself, depending on which parts of her body she targeted."
Veronika is a 13-year-old Swiss Brown cow living in Notsch at the foot of the Carinthia mountains in southern Austria. She is kept as a pet and can roam her meadow freely. She likes her back scratched and, when humans are absent, she picks up sticks, rakes, or brushes with her mouth to reach and scratch various body areas. Observers recorded that she used a brush or stick on her own body, making her the first cow observed practicing embodied tooling. When offered a deck brush she used both sides to reach different parts of her body, demonstrating multi-purpose tool use. Scientists recorded and analyzed the behavior and traveled to confirm its authenticity amid AI-related skepticism.
Read at www.dw.com
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