Scientists have been forced to rethink the intelligence of cattle after an Austrian cow named Veronika displayed an impressive – and until now undocumented – knack for tool use.
Witgar Wiegele, an organic farmer and baker from a small town in Carinthia near the Italian border, keeps Veronika as a pet and noticed that she occasionally played with sticks and used them to scratch her body.
Word soon got around and before long a video clip of the cow’s behaviour reached biologists in Vienna who specialise in animal intelligence. They immediately grasped the importance of the footage. “It was a cow using an actual tool,” said Dr Antonio Osuna Mascaró at the city’s University of Veterinary Medicine. “We got everything ready and jumped in the car to visit.”
Veronika is far from making even misshapen tools, but her prowess in using them has impressed nonetheless. Over seven sessions of 10 trials, the researchers witnessed 76 instances of tool use as she grabbed the broom to scratch otherwise unreachable regions. Using both ends of the brush counts as multi-purpose tool use, the scientists say, which is extraordinarily rare. Beyond humans, it has only been shown convincingly in chimpanzees.
good…now can we reassess the intelligence of scientists?
The mammal brain acts like a mammal? No…
Today is cows with sticks, tomorrow Cows With Guns
Rise of the planet of the cows
Veronika hid in the forest, Read books with great zeal
She loved Che Guevera, A revolutionary vealWhat’s next? Chickens in choppers?
So what you’re saying is…chicken attack?
Slaughter House: Cows Revenge.
Take my money, I want to watch that
Featuring
Tom Moos and Charlize Udders
Wrong country
Hasn’t it been known for quite some time already that pigs and cows roughly have the cognitive capacity of a three-year-old?
That’s still really fucking dumb.
You don’t know very many three year olds, do you?
Yeah…there is nothing new here that any farmer couldn’t tell you.
Just came from watching the video and intended to post this. :) Truly impressive.
And likely possible due to the environment she lives in - very different from that of dairy cows. They don’t live that long and don’t have chances of exploring the world.
We lose so much by treating animals like they’re nothing but food for humans.
“Cow Tools” was real all along
From the article …
Tool use is well known in chimps, crows, dolphins and even octopuses. The latter have been filmed throwing shells at one another. But livestock have never been considered the sharpest of animals. Gary Larson’s 1982 Far Side cartoon, Cow Tools, shows a cow standing behind a table of oddly shaped objects. It confused scores of readers, including Larson’s mother, prompting him to explain: “While I have never met a cow who could make tools, I felt sure that if I did, they (the tools) would lack something in sophistication and resemble the sorry specimens shown.”
There is no suggestion that Veronika’s skills are evidence of the evolution of an ominous new species of super-cow. As the scientists write in the study: “She did not fashion tools like the cow in Gary Larson’s cartoon, but she selected, adjusted and used one with notable dexterity and flexibility. Perhaps the real absurdity lies not in imagining a tool-using cow, but in assuming such a thing could never exist.”
Veronika is gorgeous!
She is, and I bet she’s fun to be around too.
We used to have a couple of cows when I was a kid. Shoveling their shit was hard but they’d always let you give them a hug and lick your hand. Lived a long life and gave us a lot.
My grandparents had a typical crop farm with a few chickens and one hog/one steer per year (to slaughter in fall for meat), and a milk cow. I used to love visiting them and watching grandpa give the cats a few shots of milk.
Good times back then.
She got a sister? Can I get a number?
Chickens are going to have to up their game.
INCOMING! THE VEGANS ARE INCOMING!
Don’t worry, this animal wielding a stick is still incomprehensibly dumb enough that it still would look good on a barbecue.
I get why you would think that vegans would use this as a “see! I told you animals were complex!” but no one ever said they weren’t, just that they are tasty.
Respecting animals doesn’t mean you have to become vegan. It does mean tha we shouldn’t be housing them in massive barns and killing them by the millions.
I feel like we shouldn’t be doing that regardless of their intellect. I eat meat btw. I believe in free roaming meat of all kinds.
Any other case where you cause unnecessary harm to someone while “respecting” them? And if so, then what’s that respect worth?
War.
You can absolutely respect an enemy while throwing all sorts of horrible stuff at them…
In that case you are either on the defending side, in which case the harm is not unnecessary or you are on the attacking side, which I can see no respect in.
Lacking photosynthesis, we have to kill to eat. The fact that plants don’t have faces and lack any common means of communication with us does not make them any less evolved than any other creature.
It is easy to think of them as inert objects that lack any sense of the world around them, but we already know that not to be the case. I think that understanding that makes it impossible to distinguish killing a plant or an animal. The best we can do is hold the lives we have to take in high regard by being humane, including to plants, and to avoid waste and frivolous killing.
I can’t read this as anything but solipsism or maybe good old-fashioned intellectual dishonesty. We know that animals are capable of pain and suffering and we know that plants lack the prerequisites like a nervous system, as well as any evolutionary benefit of pain, because they cannot remove themselves from danger.
The position that causing pain or not causing pain is equal is just morally bankrupt.
Oh and even if killing an animal vs. killing a plant was morally analogous, it would still be better to eat the plants directly, since many more plants are harvested to raise a single animal than it would take to feed a human.
I really don’t understand the argument of saying plants are sentient in some way because they emit chemicals when harmed or recoil. My knee jumps up if I tap it with a hammer, my brain pulls my hand away from a hot stove before I can even register any pain, neither of those are “sentient” actions, that’s just how the cells respond to stimulus, and that automatic response is because of natural selection, not sentient choices or sensations. It’s like saying an auto-closing door is sentient and we ought not try to open it because whenever you try to open it it closes itself, so it “dislikes” being open.
I am not saying they are sentient. I am more saying that it is impossible to establish an objective valuation scale for the lives of creatures. You can choose whatever subjective one you want, but we can’t lose sight of the fact that it is just our own, and even getting an army of like minded people doesn’t make you any more objectively right or wrong.
The one I choose for myself is to do what I can to minimize the suffering of any living thing I can, and avoid excess consumption. Some others are more absolute, choosing to abstain entirely from any part of the meat industry until every part of it has its act together. Others refuse to eat anything but beans and leaves, leaving the most minimal environmental impact possible. All of those and any that avoid waste and needless suffering seem valid to me and not worth the division.
Unnecessary harm means housing hundreds or thousands of animals and birds in massive barns without access to the outside environment. It’s no different than having pets, where you care for them, feed them and take them for walks. It doesn’t mean you can never kill them for food if needed.
That’s what respect means.
That’s the point, we don’t need to kill them for food, which makes it unnecesary harm.
I disagree but to each their own.
How do you “disagree”? We can disagree with opinions but weather or not humans need to eat animals to be healthy is a fact.
you don’t know what anyone else needs
Are the hundreds of millions of people who live without eating animals secretly reptiloid, or how do you make sense of that?
We don’t need to kill plants for food either.
I agree actually. Im just warning you this post will be a vegan magnet.
Vegans are fine.
I do take issue with PETA tho as they have wiped out local economies and thrust them into poverty with their anti-fur stance.
Yup. My comment isnt anti-vegan for the record. They just show up en mass.
As I do for misogynistic trash articles.
To each their own.
I’m not vegan btw.
