Holy cow!!!
scientists to reassess intelligence of cows
https://www.theguardian.com/science/...e-intelligence
Khôn như bò.Quote:
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.
Wiegle, who said Veronika recognised family members’ voices and hurried to meet them when they called, began playing with pieces of wood years ago, then worked out how to scratch herself with sticks.
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.”
Armed with a deck brush, Osuna Mascaró and his colleague Alice Auersperg set about testing Veronika’s skills. Through a series of field trials, she could not only pick up the broom, but wield it according to the job at hand. If the broom was at an awkward angle, Veronika used her tongue to reposition it before clamping it in place with her teeth.
Veronika favoured the bristled end of the broom to scratch the tough skin on her back. But she switched to the smooth handle and scratched more gently when the itch was on more delicate, lower body areas such as her udders and belly, according to the study in Current Biology.
As the scientists write in the study: “She did not fashion tools like the cow in Gary Larson’s cartoon, but she selected, adjusted and used one with notable dexterity and flexibility. Perhaps the real absurdity lies not in imagining a tool-using cow, but in assuming such a thing could never exist.”
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