So a cow can use a stick to scratch its backside. When will we learn that humans are really not that special? | Helen Pilcher

I I have a farmer friend who regularly regales me with colorful stories about her livestock. Take the time when a beef cow named Noisette used her tongue to remove the latch on her pen door so she could steal livestock nuts from the nearby feed trough. Or the moment she reoffended, not to let herself out, but apparently to stand back and watch her freed compatriots “mock and cause mayhem.”

Where others see a herd of seemingly bored cows, my friend sees a soap opera, with characters and twists and turns. Cows, she told me, learn quickly, get bored easily and have a relentless penchant for mischief.

So when news broke that a cow called Veronika was using a broom to scratch her butt, my friend was perplexed. “I don’t think many dairy farmers would be surprised to learn this,” she says.

Writing in the journal Current Biology, researchers from the Austrian Veterinary University described how Veronika, a 13-year-old brown Swiss cow, picks up the broom with her tongue, then turns it and uses it to scratch parts of her body that she otherwise couldn’t reach. The blunt end of the broom is used for the sensitive skin of the stomach, while the bristled end is reserved for the thicker skin of the upper back and buttocks.

This, the authors say, is not only the first time that tool use has been officially documented in cattle, but also the first sign that cattle can use tools in a flexible and versatile way. Veronika has elevated a humble garden brush to the status of a Swiss army knife. Wielded expertly in his mouth, the tool was both a belly gadget and a butt gadget.

The reaction was a surprise, but it shouldn’t be. We systematically underestimate the capabilities of non-human animals, even when the evidence is pervasive.

Tool use is said to occur when an animal deliberately manipulates an object to achieve a particular goal. So when my dog ​​scratches his back while rolling around on the frozen ground, it’s adorable – but it’s not tool use. The dog moves. This is not the case with the ground. When he brings me a ball because he wants to play, we manipulate an object, but it’s not the dog who throws it. Instead, he learned that I will.

For a long time, tool use was considered a uniquely human behavior. Then, in the 1960s, primatologist Jane Goodall saw a wild chimpanzee tear leaves off a twig, stick it in a termite mound, then pull it out and eat the insects clinging to it. Since then, many other examples of animal tool use have been documented. Sea otters use stones, both as hammers to dislodge mollusks anchored to the sea floor and as anvils to help break up shells. In Senegal, chimpanzees sharpen the ends of sticks to make spears, which they use to stab sleeping babies. New Caledonian crows fashion exquisite hooks from plant stems, which they use to extract larvae from logs.

Less skillful but no less impressive, polar bears would hit walruses around the head with stones, octopuses would shoot each other with shells, while “fire hawks” raptors have been spotted picking up flaming sticks during wildfires, then dropping them elsewhere to start new fires. The “fire hawks” then feast on the fleeing animals.

One by one, traits we once considered uniquely human, such as tool use, complex communication, numeracy, and culture, are falling like dominoes.

But we still prefer to maintain the illusion of our supposed superiority. I think Veronika’s story tells us less about the minds of cows than it does about the minds of people. We have become so blind that we fail to see how animals are both more intelligent and more like us than we think. My farmer friend, for her part, has her eyes wide open. She spent years working and caring for animals. She has observed their behavior and has no doubt that they are complex creatures with rich inner lives. She’s right, of course.

After Goodall reported chimpanzee tool use, it prompted British paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey to write: “Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.” » I have a fourth suggestion. We don’t need to accept cows as human beings, but we do need to get off our high horse and accept that we are not that special. Cows, on the other hand, are.