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Cows can use sophisticated tools
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- didntknowyou 9mo agothe researcher documented a cow using a stick to scratch itself. no doubt they're intelligent animals but describing them as using 'sophisticated tools' is a bit of a stretch. this behaviour is quite common in cattle and other animals, often seen rubbing or using sticks to scratch spots. sometimes it is dangerous as they find fences with nail poking out and cut themselves when rubbing to to calm an itch.
- hugeBirb 9mo ago"This behavior is quite common..." is very misleading. This specific behavior is not common. Scratching an itch does not equal using a tool to scratch an itch. Every animal I've seen in nature knows how to use external static objects to help them scratch somewhere they can't reach. Dogs cats, bears, pigs, cows... etc. I think my cats are very intelligent, I've seen them use the bristle brush attachment we have on the wall to scratch themselves. If I ever watched one of them pick up a fork with their mouth and orient it in a way to scratch their back I would absolutely lose my mind. These are not the same behaviors.
- garciasn 9mo agoIf your cats picked up a fork, it would be to eat you after they killed you in your sleep; but, I could see how that could be considered “scratching an itch.”
- ysavir 9mo agoI've seen my cats pull on a cord in order to reel in the toy at the end. I don't find that to be all too different from the cow orienting a scratcher. Should I?
- hugeBirb 9mo agoIdk I guess that's really up for you to decide. My opinion is that behavior seems very uhhh instinctual? Like if they were eating something that was running away from them I'm sure they would employ a similar tactic/behavior. Thing far away from me I need it closer. The logical steps to use a tool that would have 0 instinctual context seems leaps and bounds more "complex". I'm no animal/evolutionary scientist, just my opinion. It very well could be!
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- card_zero 9mo agoI like to claim that dinosaurs used tools, because some of them swallowed gastroliths. No reason a tool can't be internal. Oh wait, the article says external is in the "scientific definition". Fine.
- b00ty4breakfast 9mo agoI swallowed a rock when I was a kid (ok, maybe calling it a "rock" is being a bit dramatic, more like a pebble), does that make me a tool? ....wait, no
- dboreham 9mo agoThis cow picked up the stick (broom) and wielded it clenched within her teeth. Quite different than rubbing against a static object.
- westurner 9mo agoTool use by non-humans > Mammals > Other mammals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_non-humans#Other_mammals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_non-humans#Other_m...
- bigstrat2003 9mo ago> no doubt they're intelligent animals Having spent my childhood around cows, I can say there's a great deal of doubt in my mind on that point. I know from extensive first-hand experience that cows are quite stupid.
- hugeBirb 9mo agoHaving spent my entire life around cows I can say there's a great deal of evidence that cows are quite intelligent. Most of the time when people say they're dumb it's because they're hindering a human from forcing them to do something. Why should a cow "know" to go one way or the other or to not stop in a chute, or to not back up...these are just human constraints. We know what we WANT the cow to do and if they don't do that they're dumb. Sure I've seen cows do dumb things. If I was an outside observer looking at the severity and frequency that humans do dumb things I would come to the same conclusion, they're dumb.
- Loughla 9mo agoI'm with both of you. Growing up on a beef farm taught me that cows can be very dumb (no, you can't walk through the barbed wire, and no, you can't get to the water in the cistern without falling in and drowning) but also do show intelligence in some ways (the personal vendetta against the veterinarian's truck, or seeing their best friend in spring pastures and absolutely going apeshit). Like most things. . . It's shades of grey.
- mitchell_h 9mo agoI have Cows and Pigs, raised for show and meat. I would not call either animal "intelligent". I would call them stupid determined. They have all the time in the world to push, pull, grab and generally implement mayhem.
- mmooss 9mo agoDefining tool use is subtle. Here's one defintion: "... the tool is a detached object (rock) used to procure some thing (food) ordinarily incapable of being accessed without a tool.". Also it is "manipulated independent of its location." [0] Rubbing against a tree is not tool use. Similarly, dropping a nut on a rock is not tool use, but dropping a rock on a nut is. It gets a bit more complex: You can pickup a stick and use it (similar to the cow); you can first prepare the stick by stripping leaves and branches off (some primates); you can bend the stick into a useful hook (New Caledonian crows). Look up corvids and especially New Caledonian crows. they are pretty amazing; in some tasks they apparently outperform all primates except one particular species.
- buildsjets 9mo agoWikipedia has illustrations of the tools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_tools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_tools
- DoctorOW 9mo agoI knew it.
- cocacolacowboy 9mo ago[dead]
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- Sharlin 9mo agoThe Guardian has a photo and a video: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jan/19/back-scratching-cow-veronika-bovine-intelligence https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jan/19/back-scratch...
- erickhill 9mo agoOK I think all pasture raised cows should be given nice little wooden brooms going forward.
- mike978 9mo agoThey already have the "Happy Cow Brush" :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9Kynijqps4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9Kynijqps4 or a more manual version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2O7Z7cJB-w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2O7Z7cJB-w
- fuddle 9mo agoPrivacy Badger blocked 75 trackers on their site :O
- tangledknots 9mo agoIt's noteworthy to me that every scientific discovery is that non-human animals are "more clever than we thought" - and never ever the other way around.
- functionmouse 9mo agoI've seen a couple "Koalas are even dumber than we thought" articles Poor lads really are exceptionally dumb
- fellowniusmonk 9mo agoKoalas are the one that springs to mind. I believe the test result was "does not recognize their only food source (eucalyptus leaves) when served plated."
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- lo_zamoyski 9mo agoIt would be uninteresting. Think of almost any headline where some species is described as "dumber than previously thought". Not especially interesting.
- skylurk 9mo ago> headline where some species is described as "dumber than previously thought" Describes quite a lot of headlines, unfortunately for us.
- Dylan16807 9mo ago"We gave an animal some tools and a mirror and it ignored the tools and couldn't recognize itself" happens too often to be a headline.
- harimau777 9mo agoCows watch sunsets man!
- goopypoop 9mo agodoes Cordyceps use tools?
- IAmBroom 9mo agoFungi. AFAIK, fungi have never used mechanical tools. They can solve complex algos using parallel processing, but no tools. Unless you consider zombie ants to be a tool...
- MonkeyIsNull 9mo agoThat definitely counts!
- elcapitan 9mo agoCow General Intelligence (CGI) when?
- ksymph 9mo agoIt seems like the lesson we keep learning, no matter the proxy we use for intelligence, is that there is nothing that fundamentally sets humans apart from other animals (or even, in some ways, AI) other than the degree and scope of our intelligence. While I'll never begrudge science that points out the obvious -- that's often where the most value comes from -- this particular avenue is always a little funny to me, as it often belies an expectation that other animals are unable to do these things by default.
- IAmBroom 9mo agoThe primal separation of man and animals has not changed since the invention of the device... Animals fear motorized vacuum cleaners.
- hugeBirb 9mo agoI fear a motorcycle blasting down my street at 10pm. What's the difference. Once my cats realized the robo vac won't hurt them they don't even move for it anymore... Seems intelligent to initially be terrified of something and update your perception of it.
- andy99 9mo agoNature abhors a vacuum
- lo_zamoyski 9mo ago> It seems like the lesson we keep learning, no matter the proxy we use for intelligence, is that there is nothing that fundamentally sets humans apart from other animals Except it doesn't show that. The reason people make this judgement is because they don't have a coherent or clear definition of "intelligence". Nothing has been undermined, except in those who took the view that animals are dumb automatons. That's more of a legacy of modernism and the desire to gain "mastery over nature" more than anything else. The essential feature of human beings - from which the rest of human nature and its consequences follow, including our social nature - is rationality. This entails an intellect, which is the abstracting faculty. It is the intellect that makes language possible, because without the capacity to abstract from particulars, we could not have universal concepts and thus no predicates. Language would be reduced to the kind we see in other animals. For clarity, the functions of language are: 1. expressive: expressing an internal state or emotion (e.g., a cry of pain) 2. signaling: use of expressive to cause a reaction in others (e.g., danger signals) 3. descriptive: beyond immediate sensation; describes states of affairs, allowing for true or false statements 4. argumentative: allows critical analysis, inference, and rational justification Without abstraction, (3) and (4) are impossible. But all animal activity we have observed requires no appeal to (3) and (4). Non-human animals perceive objects and can manipulate them, even in very clever ways, but they do not have concepts (which are expressed as general names). Could there be other rational animals in the universe? Sure. But we haven't met any. And from an ontological POV (as opposed to a phylogenetic taxonomic classification), they would be human, as the ontological definition of "human being" - "rational animal" - would apply them.
- water-data-dude 9mo agoI never interpreted the Cow Tools strip as saying "cows are too dumb to use tools", but more along the lines of "if cows could create tools could we even fathom their use?" - kinda like the Borges story, Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge[0]. On the other hand, I read The Far Side when I was small and didn't really have the scientific chops to get a lot of the humor, so maybe I cemented an incorrect interpretation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolent_Knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevole...
- worik 9mo agoWatch out. It has been predicted... https://youtu.be/FQMbXvn2RNI?si=-Y6mo-3mWbpbZtVc https://youtu.be/FQMbXvn2RNI?si=-Y6mo-3mWbpbZtVc
- shevy-java 9mo agoOften one has to translate things into understanding by the animal at hand. Monkeys learn quickly. Cows oddly enough can also learn quickly in social cohesion. So one cow figures something out; the others often quickly adapt and learn too. So the main step is the initial hurdle to overcome. There are lots of videos about this on youtube, starting with simple ones such as scratch-objects where cows rub against and it helps them scratch areas they can not easily reach on their own.
- diggyhole 9mo agoMan, scientists and journalists would do the world a favor by stepping outside their urban bubble. Cows use all sorts of things to scratch with. It is common place to see automated cow brushes they can use on their backs on dairy farms. Cows are pretty smart. Sheep are dumb animals that try to kill themselves any number of ways. Chickens are dumb lizards with feathers.
- MomsAVoxell 9mo agoI can confirm that cows are also capable of opening gates, and closing them, and also of doing so in a manner intending to antagonize goats, while also giving the farmer something to do. Moo.
- ThePowerOfFuet 9mo agoAs the saying goes, nobody on the internet knows you're a cow.
- metalman 9mo agoI realy admire how dogs used rockets to beat humans into space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laika https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laika
- rurban 9mo agoOriginal paper: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(25)01597-0 https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(25)... with much better info and even videos
- xhkkffbf 9mo agoDoesn't the old metaphor claim that someone writes open source code to "scratch an itch?" That makes these cows open source developers!