cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/45810913
Cows are not usually credited with thinking on the hoof. They eat, they chew, they stand in fields performing an activity that may look like contemplation but is generally written off as digestion.
They are not typically thought to plan, let alone solve problems. A new study suggests we may have underestimated them.
The research describes what experts claim is the first documented case of flexible, multi-purpose tool use in cattle, observed in a cow named Veronika.
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Veronika is a Swiss brown cow kept not for milk or meat but as a pet by Witgar Wiegele, an organic farmer and baker in Austria. More than a decade ago he noticed her using a long-handled brush, holding it in her mouth to scratch awkward parts of her body.
When video footage of this behaviour reached Alice Auersperg, a cognitive biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, it struck her as unusual, largely because Veronika used the brush in different ways to scratch different parts of her body.
“It was immediately clear that this was not accidental,” Auersperg said. “This was a meaningful example of tool use in a species that is rarely considered from a cognitive perspective.”
Auersperg and her colleague Antonio Osuna-Mascaró conducted a series of trials. They placed a long-handled brush on the ground and recorded how Veronika used it.
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When scratching broad, thick-skinned regions such as her back or rump, Veronika tended to use the bristled end, applying it with sweeping, forceful movements. When targeting softer, more sensitive areas of her lower body, she switched to using the handle to scratch herself, moving more slowly.
Because Veronika directs tools at her own body, researchers describe this as egocentric tool use, which is usually regarded as less complex than tool use aimed at external objects. Even so, flexible, multi-purpose use of a single tool is rare. Outside humans, it has previously been demonstrated convincingly only in chimpanzees, the researchers say in their paper.
They wrote in a study published in the journal Current Biology that the findings “invite a reassessment of livestock cognition”.
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The researchers suspect that Veronika’s life circumstances have played a role in the emergence of this behaviour. Most cows do not reach her age and they are rarely given the opportunity to interact with a variety of potentially useful objects.
Her long lifespan, daily contact with humans, and access to a rich physical landscape probably created favorable conditions, they said. If that is true, there may be nothing very exceptional about Veronika, other than the opportunities she has been given to exercise her brain.
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They are not typically thought to plan, let alone solve problems. A new study suggests we may have underestimated them.
Never understood these views. Is it not planning, when cows predict where a predator is likely to appear again after it has disappeared behind some shrubs?
And is it not also problem solving in some way to run the hell away from predators?In particular, the tool use category feels like we’re asking a fish to climb a tree. There’s only so much cows can achieve with tools, since they can only hold those tools with their mouths. They might be solving physics equations in their third stomach and we’re asking, if they’ve figured out how to bang two rocks together.
Like, no, I don’t either believe that they are solving physics equations, but you can throw a ball for them and they’ll correctly estimate where it’ll go and in what direction to kick it back:
Which I feel like it should count for more intelligence than being able to extend your reach with a stick.
I don’t either believe that they are solving physics equations
If they had language and writing skills is there any doubt they couldn’t.
Thinking other animals are incapable of complex thoughts is so weird. We know that humans only have these abilities because of the momentum of society. Feral humans are proof none of what we do is innate.
Oh yeah, as a wise Adam Savage once said:
Remember kids, the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.
That cow in the GIF is screwing around. But if it could have a chat with its cow friends about how that ball is flying and they could write that shit down – and they’d have stable enough of a food supply and no predators – then I 100% believe that they would continue screwing around + writing down, until they’ve figured out a rule for how that ball flies.
And from that point, they would start building trebuchets and take over the world. Cause that’s how things go, appparently…
Yeah prolly just a bit of sensationalist writing, i guess?
I mean, I hope so. I’ve just seen this sentiment expressed so often, that cows must be nearly braindead, because you don’t hear them reciting Shakespeare while they’re chewing grass.
I believe, that’s a general herbivore survival strategy to not
recite Shakespearemove much while they’re eating, so that they don’t draw attention from predators and conserve energy. At least, similar behaviour can also be seen in deer and bunnies.But yeah, clearly they’re intelligent enough to have survived until we domesticated them, despite being a big hunk of meat.
Love it. Love everything about it.
Sim-Far Side did itI love that this article has already been updated to mention this cow’s tools!
put out that cigarrete, Carl.
