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Welcome to Your Daily Dot where Dot will share tips, advice, and stories on how we can make our world better. |
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All Dear Dot illustrations by Elissa Turnbull. |
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Dear Reader,
Dot has long loved Gary Larson’s The Far Side, and one of my favorite comics features three panels in which a group of cows (click here, scroll down) stand on two legs with one acting a lookout. “Car,” says the scout and the bovines fall to four legs as a vehicle speeds past, after which they resume their biped stance. I adore Larson’s intimation that cows are smarter than we gave them credit for — that they have alternate lives of sophistication and complexity.
Turns out Larson was onto something. Veronika is a family pet, a long-lived Swiss Brown cow who belongs to Austrian organic farmer Witgar Wiegele. Wiegele had noticed in the past that Veronika would pick up sticks and use them to scratch herself. A recorded video of Veronika giving herself a good scratch came to the attention of Alice Auersperg, a cognitive biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna. “When I saw the footage, it was immediately clear that this was not accidental,” Auersperg told a reporter. “This was a meaningful example of tool use in a species that is rarely considered from a cognitive perspective.” Auersperg, fascinated, wanted to see how Veronika might use other tools made available to her. The cow picked up a deck brush, no doubt more effective than a stick, to give her backside a good scratch. The only person not surprised at Veronika’s ingenuity was Wiegele. And perhaps Gary Larson. |
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This isn't Veronika but it is a Swiss Brown cow who is undoubtedly as clever. And cute. |
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Auersperg suggested that “the findings highlight how assumptions about livestock intelligence may reflect gaps in observation rather than genuine cognitive limits.” In other words, cows have probably always been demonstrating intelligence. Most of us just haven’t been paying attention.
(Ready to mooo-ve meat off your plate? Check out Bluedot’s Cheat Sheet for Less Meat.)
Amoooosedly,
Dot
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What does it take to spend your career working on something that might not pay off right away — but could change everything if it does? This week on Imagine If, we’re joined by plasma physicist Alex Creely of Commonwealth Fusion Systems for a grounded, human conversation about one of the most ambitious clean-energy ideas of our time: fusion power. Alex walks us through what it really means to “build a star on Earth,” why fusion has always felt just out of reach, and what’s shifted in recent years to make the next decade feel pivotal.
Click now to listen on your favorite listening platform!
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