By On a quiet Austrian farm, a single cow has been busy doing something cows are not supposed to do—thinking like a tool user.
A study published January 19, 2026, in Current Biology reports the first scientifically verified case of tool use in cattle, and the star of the show is a 13-year-old Swiss Brown cow named Veronika. Not raised for milk or meat but kept as a pet, Veronika was observed calmly picking up a long-handled deck brush and scratching her own hard-to-reach itches—methodically, repeatedly, and with a level of finesse that caught scientists entirely off guard.
This was not a party trick. Veronika didn’t just rub against objects the way animals often do. She grasped the brush with her tongue, lifted it, positioned it precisely, and applied it with purpose, writes The National Geographic. Even more impressive, she showed a flexible understanding of the tool itself—using different parts of the same object depending on the job at hand.
Cows itch, just like us. But Veronika the cow takes things into her own hands. Or rather: into her mouth.
Scientists say it’s the first experimentally verified instance of cattle using a tool. https://t.co/lnEEHQgVai pic.twitter.com/kxGEK4MWsH
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) January 20, 2026
The discovery began the way many good ones do: with someone paying attention. Veronika’s owner, organic farmer and baker Witgar Wiegele, noticed years ago that the cow occasionally picked up sticks to relieve stubborn itches. Over time, her technique improved. Sticks were abandoned. A proper brush became the tool of choice. The motions grew consistent, deliberate, and unmistakably intentional.
Wiegele shared videos of the behavior, which eventually reached researchers who realized this was no ordinary barnyard quirk. When scientists arrived to observe Veronika under controlled conditions, the cow did not disappoint. Across multiple sessions, she used the brush 76 times—lifting it, maneuvering it, and applying it to specific parts of her body with striking reliability.
Then came the detail that made researchers sit up straighter. When scratching tougher areas like her back and upper body, Veronika consistently used the bristled end of the brush. When tending to more sensitive regions—her belly and udder—she flipped the tool and used the smooth wooden handle instead.
That distinction matters. Purposefully exploiting different physical properties of the same object to achieve different outcomes is a classic marker of advanced tool use—previously associated mostly with primates like chimpanzees.
Veronika did it without training, cues, or rewards. She simply figured it out.
For animal cognition researchers, the implications are quietly profound. Cattle have lived alongside humans for thousands of years, yet their mental capacities have largely been reduced to questions of productivity. Intelligence, when it appeared at all, was rarely something people thought to look for.
Tool use has been documented in species ranging from crows and octopuses to elephants and orcas, but cows have long been left out of the conversation. Veronika’s brush suggests that omission may say more about human assumptions than bovine limits.
The lesson here isn’t that every cow is secretly a barnyard engineer. It’s that intelligence often reveals itself only when animals are given space to explore, experiment, and solve their own problems.
