First Recorded Evidence of a Cow Using Tools

Apart from humans, only chimpanzees have been acknowledged as making use of tools. Now, a cow called Veronika has joined the club - challenging long-held assumptions about bovine intelligence.

Credit: Antonio Osuna-Mascaro & Alice Auersperg

A few years ago, a farmer in a small picturesque Austrian town - “straight out of The Sound of Music” - noticed that his pet cow would use sticks to scratch herself. The Swiss brown cow, named Veronika, also appeared to hone her technique over the years.

In 2025, two researchers from the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna heard about Veronika's ability, and decided to investigate. They observed how Veronika used a deck-cleaning broom over a series of 70 trials last summer. The definition of tool use is strict - an animal must intentionally use an object in order to achieve a specific goal.

Veronika consistently used the broom as a tool, using her tongue to get a grip on the broom’s handle and manoeuver it to scratch different parts of her body. The researchers had assumed that Veronika would mainly use the broom’s bristled end to scratch herself, but she occasionally flipped it around to reach the softer parts of her body. At first, the researchers thought it was a mistake. “But after a while we started to observe a pattern: Veronika indeed had a preference for using the broom end, but when she used the handle end she was doing so in a meaningful way,” Antonio Osuna-Mascaró to The Guardian.

The researchers don’t think Veronika is an unusually smart cow. Rather, her upbringing may have enabled her to pick up the skill. Osuna-Mascaró explains to Scientific American that Veronika’s human family provided “the special conditions that enabled Veronika to express herself.” Her owner gave her sticks and rakes that she could learn to manipulate, something most cows don’t have access to.

The researchers hope their work will inspire other scientists to look at species that may have been overlooked, such as other farm animals.

There was more intriguing news in November last year when video footage claimed to capture the first recorded use of a tool by a wild wolf in Canada. The jury is still out on that one, but maybe a wild wolf will soon join Veronika in the rather exclusive club of tool users. But before you form your view about this wolf, take a look at Veronika in action.