I’m pleased for Veronika the cow, obviously. It’s nice that, alone among cowkind, she has developed flexible tool use. It’s nicer still that in her Austrian pastures, manipulating an old broom amid the edelweiss, she no longer has an itchy back.
But am I impressed? On this point I differ from the millions who watched Veronika scratching her flank in a video to accompany a research paper in the journal Current Biology. Her actions, it was claimed, changed our understanding of animal cognition — making human cognition a little less special in the process.
Maybe. Yet when it comes to unexpected animal tool use, Veronika’s undoubted achievement doesn’t make my top five. Those five? The dolphins of Shark Bay, Australia, obviously. They put sea sponges on their noses for comfort when snuffing around for prey on the seabed. There are the elephants that clean their ears with grass. There are Aesop’s crows which, like in the fable, put stones into a jug until the water level is high enough to drink.
• VIDEO — Outstanding in her field: cow recorded using tool for first time
No list could exclude the cute sea otters, which carry small rocks under their forearms so they can use them to mercilessly smash shellfish. My favourite? The Japanese crows that drop nuts on to a zebra crossing, then wait for cars to crack them.
What does this mean? Once, we thought tool use uniquely human. When it was spotted in chimpanzees, the paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey said: “Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as human.”
We keep doing this. Once we thought humans unique in planning for the future. Tell that to Santino the zoo chimp, who stunned cognition researchers (metaphorically) and tourists (literally) by collecting rocks at night to throw at visitors by day.
Maybe what makes us special is culture: accumulated knowledge and fashions? Let me introduce you to the salmon hat orcas. Nearly 30 years ago, for just one season, a pod was spotted sporting a fetching dead salmon. Then in late 2024 — like discovering that fascinators were back at Ascot — they did it again.
• Orcas blamed for yacht attacks are speaking their own language
Not only is separating human intelligence from that of animals hard, it’s tricky to separate animals’ from plants’, which learn, respond, know friends from family and warn each other of danger. Some philosophers argue that plants are sentient. Mind you, some argue thermostats are too.
As soon as we find something to define us uniquely, we find it elsewhere — and then we don’t seem so unique. Does our intelligence just sit on a spectrum with other animals (and thermostats)? When I find myself agreeing with that, I recall I am doing so while writing on a laptop beneath the flight path of aeroplanes. And it feels like nonsense.
Which is why I like the argument of Simon Baron-Cohen, the Cambridge researcher. One thing about human intelligence is we love binaries, easy definitions to easily categorise things. But, he argues, the position on a spectrum really matters. Qualitative differences in inputs produce binary chasms in outcomes.
He points to the simplest human tool: the flint spear. To make one you knap flint, find a stick, cut a notch, insert the flint, find some fibre, tie on the flint. It’s not one flash of insight — the sort that comes to an itchy cow. It’s six, each in order, each pointless alone. In other words Veronika, while you may be the Heisenberg of heifers, until your cow chums actually make a broom, I’m more impressed by your cheese.