A cow in Austria has been observed using tools ― the first time such behavior has been recorded in cattle. Have we underestimated the gentle bovines all this time?Meet Veronika.

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The 13-year-old Swiss Brown cow lives in the village of Nötsch at the foot of the Carinthia mountains in southern Austria. She's kept as a pet by a local farmer, and can roam her meadow to her heart's delight.

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Like many other pets, she likes to have her back scratched. If no friendly humans are around to do the job, that's not a problem ― Veronika uses a brush or stick to do it herself.

That makes Veronika the first cow to have been observed to practice "embodied tooling" — using a tool on her own body.

What's more, when presented with a deck brush, Veronika used both sides of it to scratch herself, depending on which parts of her body she targeted.

That's considered "multi-purpose tool use" — something previously recorded only in chimpanzees in central Africa (and humans).

Alice Auersperg and Antonio Osuna-Mascaro from the University of Veterinarian Medicine in Vienna recorded and analyzed Veronika's behavior. They published their findings in a new study in the journal Current Biology on January 19, 2026.

Is this a real cow or AI?

Auersperg, an expert in animal behavior and innovation, published a book on the topic in February 2025.

After that, she was inundated with messages from people telling her about innovative behaviors they claimed to have witnessed in their cats or pet birds.

One video in particular drew her attention. In it, a brown cow was using an old rake to scratch her back against the backdrop of a bucolic Austrian village that "looks like something out of 'Sound of Music,'" Auersperg told DW.

She and Osuna-Mascaro traveled to Veronika's home in Nötsch to make sure it was real. After all, AI is everywhere these days. Who was to say this cow was even real?

"We can never trust an anecdote just like that," Auersperg said. "You can create deepfakes, or you can have a heavily trained behavior."

So she and her colleague set out to see this tool-using cow for themselves.

Turns out Veronika is very much real. Her owner Witkar Wiegele has already kept Veronika's mother as a pet. Now it's Veronika herself who starts mooing loudly when she sees Wiegele coming.

Cow chose different brush ends for different purposes

Auersperg and Osuna-Mascaro ate lots of apple strudel with the Wiegele family, and watched Veronika do her thing.

After a few days, Auersperg had to return to Vienna, but Osuna-Mascaro stayed in Nötsch for several weeks where he conducted 70 trials with the cow.

In it, Veronica performed multi-purpose tool use again and again with the deck brush the researcher provided.

"Veronika had a preference for the broom end of the stick instead of the handle; she was using it 2.5 times more often," Osuna-Mascaro told DW.

Veronika used that end, the one with the bristles, to scratch the rear half and upper parts of her body in long, broad strokes.

"But from time to time, she was also using the handle end of the stick," the researcher said. "At the beginning, we thought that was the result of a mistake. But she was also using the handle end in a meaningful way: She used it to scratch those body areas where her skin is soft and delicate, like the udder, the navel flap, her belly button."

When using the handle end, Veronika was also scratching differently — more of a careful poking movement.

'We just assume cows must be stupid'

Osuna-Mascaro said getting to know Veronika was an "intense experience."

"Sometimes cows behave a little bit like cats," he said. "They are not like dogs that come to you immediately. You need to gain [Veronika's] trust."

But why is this cow in rural Austria displaying behavior previously unseen, or at least not scientifically recorded, in any kinds of cattle?

For one, animal behavior researchers have not been paying very much attention to cows.

"Veronika does not belong to one of those exotic species that we would normally look for tool use in," Auersperg said. Cows are "this livestock species that's been domesticated for 10,000 years. They are everywhere around us. We just assume they must be stupid because of them being a livestock animal."

But Veronika's tool use shows humans may have underestimated cows. Auersperg and Osuna-Mascaro don't think this is a one-off case, either.

"We do not believe that Veronika is a bovine Einstein," Auersperg said.

Instead, she and her colleague suspect it's Veronika's living circumstances that facilitated her multi-purpose tool use.

"Unlike almost every cow on this planet, Veronika is not kept for [milk or meat] production, but is a beloved family pet," Auersperg said.

Her owner said it took Veronika years of practice with sticks to perfect her use of scratching tools. Most cows don't make it to 13.

"She's a pet, she's had lots of enrichment, lots of things lying around that she can pick up and interact with, and she's been given this really long life," Auersperg said.

"We have no proof whatsoever that cows are stupid animals," she added. "To have the capacity for this behavior go unobserved may have something to do with the way these animals are kept around us."

Maybe we'd observe more cows using tools if we gave them the freedom to roam and explore.

Edited by: M Agius

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jan 19, 2026 10:30 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).