Brown Swiss in Austria has been discovered using tools in different ways – something only ever seen in humans and chimpanzees

Scientists have been forced to rethink the intelligence of cattle after an Austrian cow named Veronika displayed an impressive – and until now undocumented – knack for tool use.

Witgar Wiegele, an organic farmer and baker from a small town in Carinthia near the Italian border, keeps Veronika as a pet and noticed that she occasionally played with sticks and used them to scratch her body.

Word soon got around and before long a video clip of the cow’s behaviour reached biologists in Vienna who specialise in animal intelligence. They immediately grasped the importance of the footage. “It was a cow using an actual tool,” said Dr Antonio Osuna Mascaró at the city’s University of Veterinary Medicine. “We got everything ready and jumped in the car to visit.”

Veronika is far from making even misshapen tools, but her prowess in using them has impressed nonetheless. Over seven sessions of 10 trials, the researchers witnessed 76 instances of tool use as she grabbed the broom to scratch otherwise unreachable regions. Using both ends of the brush counts as multi-purpose tool use, the scientists say, which is extraordinarily rare. Beyond humans, it has only been shown convincingly in chimpanzees.

  • 🦄🦄🦄@feddit.orgEnglish
    2·
    16 hours ago

    I can’t read this as anything but solipsism or maybe good old-fashioned intellectual dishonesty. We know that animals are capable of pain and suffering and we know that plants lack the prerequisites like a nervous system, as well as any evolutionary benefit of pain, because they cannot remove themselves from danger.

    The position that causing pain or not causing pain is equal is just morally bankrupt.

    Oh and even if killing an animal vs. killing a plant was morally analogous, it would still be better to eat the plants directly, since many more plants are harvested to raise a single animal than it would take to feed a human.

    • tar@lemmy.zipEnglish
      1·
      11 hours ago

      cows mostly graze, but they’re also fed things like corncobs and stalks. people can’t eat those.

      • 🦄🦄🦄@feddit.orgEnglish
        0·
        11 hours ago

        cows mostly graze

        Weather that is true or not aside: The point was that the other person doesn’t see a moral difference between cutting a pigs neck open or plucking an apple from a tree.