Meet Veronika.
The 13-year-old Swiss Brown cow lives in the village of Nötsch at the foot of the Carinthian Mountains in southern Austria. Kept as a pet by local farmer Witgar Wiegele, she is free to roam her meadow.
Like many pets, Veronika enjoys having her back scratched. When no human is available, she picks up objects — sticks, rakes or brushes — in her mouth and uses them to scratch different parts of her body. That makes her the first cow observed practicing “embodied tooling,” meaning she uses a tool on her own body.
Researchers Alice Auersperg and Antonio Osuna-Mascaro from the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna recorded and analyzed Veronika’s behavior and published their findings in Current Biology on January 19, 2026.
The researchers first learned about the cow after Auersperg, an expert in animal behavior and innovation, received messages following a book she published in February 2025. One video showed a brown cow using an old rake to scratch her back in a picturesque Austrian village. Concerned about the possibility of deepfakes or trained behavior, Auersperg and Osuna-Mascaro travelled to Nötsch to investigate. Veronika proved to be genuine; her owner had kept her mother as a pet before, and Veronika greets Wiegele enthusiastically.
Osuna-Mascaro stayed for several weeks and conducted 70 trials with a deck brush provided by the researcher. Veronika repeatedly demonstrated multipurpose tool use: she chose different ends of the same tool for different tasks. She preferred the broom end (the bristles) 2.5 times more often than the handle, using the bristled end for long, broad strokes on the rear and upper body. She used the handle end — with a more careful, poking motion — to touch more delicate areas such as the udder, navel flap and belly button. Initially thought to be mistakes, the selective use of brush ends showed meaningful, task-specific choices.
Osuna-Mascaro described getting to know Veronika as an “intense experience,” noting cows can be aloof and require time to gain their trust. Auersperg pointed out that cows are rarely the focus of such studies; domesticated livestock are everywhere, and people often assume they lack sophistication. Veronika’s behavior suggests humans may have underestimated cows’ cognitive capacities.
The researchers do not think Veronika is unique because of innate genius. Rather, they suspect her living circumstances enabled the behavior: unlike most cattle, Veronika is a beloved family pet who has had enrichment, objects to interact with, and a long life (many cows do not reach age 13). Her years of practice with sticks likely helped her refine tool use.
Auersperg and Osuna-Mascaro argue that the lack of recorded tool use in cows may reflect how these animals are kept. If more cattle were allowed to roam, explore and interact with objects over longer lives, similar behaviors might be observed more often.
Correction, January 20, 2026: An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of cow owner Witgar Wiegele. DW apologizes for the error.