"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."
"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. That's considered "multipurpose tool use" something previously recorded only in chimpanzees in central Africa (and humans). Alice Auersperg and Antonio Osuna-Mascaro from the University of Veterinarian Medicine in Vienna recorded and analyzed Veronika's behavior. They published their findings in a new study in the journal Current Biology on January 19, 2026."
Veronika is a 13-year-old Swiss Brown cow kept as a pet in Notsch at the foot of the Carinthian Mountains in southern Austria and is free to roam her meadow. She prefers having her back scratched and, when humans are absent, picks up sticks, rakes or brushes with her mouth to reach and scratch various body areas. When given a deck brush she used both sides depending on the targeted area, demonstrating multipurpose tool use. The behavior constitutes embodied tooling — using a tool on her own body — and was recorded and analyzed at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna amid concerns about verifying authenticity in the AI era.
Read at www.dw.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]