"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. 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."
"After that, she was inundated with messages from people telling her about innovative behaviors they claimed to have witnessed in their cats or pet birds. One video in particular drew her attention. In it, a brown cow was using an old rake to scratch her back against the backdrop of a bucolic Austrian village that "looks like something out of 'Sound of Music,'" Auersperg told DW. She and Osuna-Mascaro traveled to Veronika's home in Notsch to make sure it was real."
Veronika is a 13-year-old Swiss Brown cow living as a pet in Notsch near the Carinthia mountains in southern Austria and can roam her meadow freely. Veronika uses a brush or stick to scratch her own back when humans are not available, making her the first cow observed practicing embodied tooling. When given a deck brush she used both sides to target different body parts, demonstrating multi-purpose tool use previously recorded only in chimpanzees and humans. Alice Auersperg and Antonio Osuna-Mascaro from the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna recorded and analyzed the behavior and published the findings in Current Biology on January 19, 2026. Video verification was sought amid concerns about deepfakes and fabricated footage.
Read at www.dw.com
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