Austrian Cow Uses Tools Like a Chimp, Scientists Amazed

When Veronika the cow wants her back scratched, she doesn't wait around for help. This 13-year-old Swiss Brown cow picks up sticks, rakes, or brushes with her mouth and goes to work on those hard-to-reach spots herself.

What makes this behavior extraordinary is that Veronika is the first cow ever recorded practicing "embodied tooling," or using a tool on her own body. Even more impressive, she uses different ends of a deck brush for different purposes, something previously seen only in central African chimpanzees and humans.

Researchers Alice Auersperg and Antonio Osuna-Mascaro from the University of Veterinarian Medicine in Vienna traveled to Veronika's home in the village of Nötsch, Austria, to verify what they'd seen in a video. They wanted to make sure this wasn't AI trickery or heavily trained behavior.

Turns out Veronika is completely real and self-taught. Her owner Witkar Wiegele keeps her as a beloved family pet in a meadow at the foot of the Carinthia mountains, where she roams freely among objects she can pick up and explore.

Over 70 trials, the researchers watched Veronika choose the bristle end of a brush 2.5 times more often than the handle to scratch the rear and upper parts of her body with long, broad strokes. But for delicate areas like her udder, navel, and belly, she carefully flipped the brush to use the smooth handle end with gentle poking movements.

"We just assume cows must be stupid because of them being a livestock animal," Auersperg told reporters. But Veronika's sophisticated tool use suggests humans have seriously underestimated cattle intelligence.

Why This Inspires

The researchers don't think Veronika is a "bovine Einstein." Instead, they believe her living situation unlocked abilities that most cows never get to express.

Unlike the vast majority of cattle, Veronika lives as a cherished pet with freedom to explore, plenty of enrichment, and a long life to practice her skills. Most cows don't make it to 13 years old.

Her owner says it took Veronika years of practice with sticks to perfect her scratching technique. That kind of time to learn and experiment is something production animals simply don't get.

"We have no proof whatsoever that cows are stupid animals," Auersperg said. The capacity for complex behavior may have gone unobserved because of how these animals are typically kept.

The study, published in Current Biology on January 19, 2026, opens the door to rethinking what we know about animal intelligence. Maybe cows have been surprising us all along, and we just weren't paying attention.