Veronika uses a long-handled brush to scratch her back and other out-of-reach body parts.
Veronika, a pet brown Swiss cow, has learned to use tools such as a deck brush (shown) to scratch parts of her body she couldn’t otherwise reach.
AJ Osuna-Mascaró and AMI Auersperg/Current biology 2026
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A deck brush can be a good tool to accomplish the right task. Just ask Veronika, the brown Swiss cow.
Veronika uses both ends of a deck brush scratching various parts of its body, researchers report January 19 Current biology. This is the first use of a tool in a cow, a species that is often “cognitively underestimated,” say the researchers.
Cows usually rub against trees, rocks or wooden planks to scratch, but Veronika’s handy tool allows her to reach parts of her body she couldn’t otherwise, says Antonio Osuna-Mascaró, a cognitive biologist at the Messerli Research Institute at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna. It’s unclear exactly how the cow figured this out, but “somehow, Veronika learned to use tools, and she’s doing something that other cows just can’t do.” »
Veronika, a pet cow who lives in a pasture on a small Austrian farm, grabs the brush by the handle with her tongue and turns her neck to place the brush where she needs it. By placing the brush in front of her in different orientations, she demonstrated using the hard, bristled end to target most areas, including the tough, thick skin on her back. She also uses the hairless end, slowly moving the handle over softer parts of the body such as her belly button and udder.
Veronika uses different parts of a deck brush to reach different parts of her body. She uses the end of the brush to scratch large areas such as her thigh (top left) and back (top right). She uses the handle to scratch more delicate areas like her belly button (bottom left) and her anus (bottom right).
AJ Osuna-Mascaró and AMI Auersperg/Current biology 2026
“At first I thought it was a mistake” that Veronika used the handle to scratch, says Osuna-Mascaró. “But after watching Veronika for a little while, it was obvious that she was using both ends of the tool in different ways to target different areas of the body.”
Manipulation of a tool for multiple purposes has been systematically observed only in chimpanzees.
“People are happy to recognize that dolphins and so on are extremely intelligent,” says Lindsay Matthews, an animal behaviorist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, who was not involved in the work. “But I believe that most animals are extremely intelligent if given the right task at hand.” For example, he has potty trained cows.
A smart tactic is to have Veronika sometimes turn her head one way to use the end of the brush and the other to use the end of the stick, Matthews says. “I found it was very effective not to have to re-grip the brush.” He thinks it would be interesting to test how she handles other tools, like one with brushes on both ends.
It’s important to note that Veronika is just a cow, so not all cows are necessarily tool users, says Alice Auersperg, a cognitive biologist also at Messerli. “This shows a problem-solving ability dedicated to a specific problem, and in an animal that is not necessarily smarter than all the other cows but is raised in a completely different way than we normally raise” as a pet on a small farm and not on an industrial scale. Veronika’s bucolic life may have given her the freedom to explore one’s environment and learn to use a tool.
