A cow in Austria named Veronika has been recorded using a tool to scratch herself, marking the first documented tool use by a cow.

World’s First Studied Tool Use by a Cow

Alice Auersperg and Antonio J. Osuna Mascaró at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna received the footage of a Swiss brown cow in Carinthia, southern Austria, using a rake to scratch her own back. Though Veronika hadn’t made the tool herself, she had picked up the object and aimed it at herself to achieve a goal, which meets the strict definition of tool use in animals.

After receiving the footage, the two researchers journeyed to meet Veronika’s owner, Witgar Wiegele, an organic farmer and baker.

“Witgar just dropped the stick in front of her, and out comes, like a rolled carpet, the tongue, grasps the stick in the tip, rolls it in like a hand, pulls it back into the mouth, and then the mouth closes,” Auersperg said to IFL Science. “Then she just turns her head and starts scratching, like within seconds.”

Veronika, who is a family pet and not kept for the production of milk or beef, reportedly began picking up sticks to scratch herself when she was only 3 years old. She’s now 13 years old, and  Wiegele has always made sure that she has sticks readily available in her paddock.

Osuna Mascaró remained there for two weeks, filming Veronika in 70 trials across seven sessions to establish whether she was sensitive to the broom’s specific textures (handle vs. brush). Reportedly, she tended to use the brush end, but sometimes she didn’t.

“From time to time, she was using the handle end to scratch herself, and at the beginning this looked like a mistake,” he said. “But after a while, we started to recognise a pattern.”

They noticed that Veronika would pick up the broom by the brush only to scratch more sensitive areas of her skin without the harshness of the bristles. This demonstrated that the tool use was multipurpose, which is an achievement only otherwise observed in chimps.

The study is published in Current Biology.