Meet Veronika. She’s a 13-year-old Swiss Brown cow living as a pet on farmer Witgar Wiegele’s land in Nötsch, at the foot of the Carinthian Mountains in southern Austria. Unlike most cattle, Veronika is free to roam her meadow and interact with objects — and she’s turned that freedom into a clever habit.
When people aren’t around to scratch her back, Veronika picks up sticks, rakes or brushes in her mouth and uses them on her own body. Researchers from the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, Alice Auersperg and Antonio Osuna-Mascaro, documented this behavior and published their analysis in Current Biology on January 19, 2026. They describe Veronika’s actions as “embodied tooling”: using a tool to manipulate her own body.
Auersperg first heard about the cow after readers contacted her following a book she published in February 2025. One video showed a brown cow using an old rake to scratch itself in a picturesque Austrian village. To rule out deepfakes or trained tricks, Auersperg and Osuna-Mascaro traveled to Nötsch to observe Veronika in person. The cow was genuine and well known to her owner: Wiegele had kept Veronika’s mother as a pet as well, and Veronika greeted him enthusiastically.
Osuna-Mascaro stayed for several weeks and ran 70 trials using a deck brush provided by the researcher. Veronika repeatedly demonstrated flexible, multipurpose tool use: she selected different ends of the same tool for different tasks. She favored the bristled broom end about 2.5 times more than the handle, using the bristles for long, broad strokes on her rear and upper body. For more delicate regions such as the udder, navel flap and belly button, she used the handle with careful, poking movements. What at first looked like errors turned out to be consistent, task-specific choices.
The researchers say getting to know Veronika was “an intense experience,” noting that cows can be reserved and require time to build trust. Auersperg adds that livestock species are often overlooked in cognition studies; because cattle are widespread and familiar, people can underestimate their mental abilities. Veronika’s behavior challenges that assumption.
Auersperg and Osuna-Mascaro do not claim Veronika is uniquely gifted by innate talent. Instead, they suggest her pet lifestyle — long life, enrichment, and access to objects to manipulate — likely made the behavior possible and allowed her to refine it over years. The researchers argue that the scarcity of recorded tool use in cows may reflect how animals are kept rather than an absence of problem-solving capacity. If more cattle had opportunities to explore, interact with objects and live longer, similar behaviors might appear more often.
Correction, January 20, 2026: An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of cow owner Witgar Wiegele. We apologize for the error.