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“This Was Not Accidental”: Scientists Unravel Video Supposedly Showing a Pet Cow Using Tools (thedebrief.org)

submitted 23 hours ago by artifex@piefed.social to c/science@lemmy.world

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Scientists investigating video of a cow using tools, and later conducting some basic psychology experiments on said cow, say their findings could expand the list of animals capable of tool use.

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[–] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

That's a fair point. On the other hand, Veronika is described as a pet, which might mean she's not even being milked, and her lifestyle is perhaps more conductive to letting her experiment and learn about her environment than usual.

Still, we haven't been treated cows that horribly until relatively recently (not to say that older practices were particularly humane either), and there's probably a solid number of cows living outside of that system, so I'd still expect something like tool usage being noticed sooner than 2026. Which is of course a subjective impression, there may be other, better explanations...

[–] Grass@sh.itjust.works 4 points 12 hours ago

I've always found tool use to be a strange metric considering the number of humans I've seen over the years that can hardly use things that automate all the work. I would count this as a tool, but cats and dogs can communicate with sound boards and I've seen in person that parrots can go beyond just sound mimicry using them as well via touch screen equivalents. I suspect pigs could probably do well with this method too. I don't have the financial means to make a study on this happen but I would like to see if any animals could teach their own children to communicate with a sound board. I'm quite certain that we have been underestimating animals for a long time.