The Broom-Wielding Cow Exposes Our Arrogance
A cow called Veronika picks up a broom with her mouth, twists her neck, and scratches an itch she cannot reach.
Not randomly.
Not clumsily.
Deliberately.
She uses the bristles for thick hide. She flips the tool and uses the smooth handle for softer skin. She switches ends depending on the job.
That is not reflex.
That is not instinct.
That is problem solving.
Researchers documented her behaviour in Current Biology after more than 70 trials. They called it multipurpose tool use. Something previously thought to belong to primates. Ten thousand years living beside cattle. And we are only just noticing. Not because cows suddenly became clever. Because we never bothered to look.
The surprise is the embarrassing part
When the story broke, people reacted as if reality had malfunctioned.
A cow? Using a tool?
Impossible. Funny. Cute.
The response told us more about humans than cows.
Farmers were not shocked. One described a cow who learned to unhook her pen door with her tongue so she could raid the feed bin. Then did it again just to watch the others escape and cause chaos. Learning. Repetition. Intent. Everyday intelligence.
Yet the public still clings to the same old fiction. Herd animal. Blank stare. Grass in, milk out.
We don’t see minds.
We see commodities.
They are not reacting. They are predicting
This is where the science gets uncomfortable.
Animals are not stimulus response machines. They are predictive learners.
Work on the “Bayesian brain” model shows that animals:
▫️form expectations
▫️update beliefs from experience
▫️anticipate outcomes
▫️feel not just what happens, but what they think will happen next
Rats show placebo effects. Exploration is used to reduce uncertainty. Long periods of negative experience create pessimism and learned helplessness.
In plain language:
They don’t just feel.
They interpret.
They don’t just suffer.
They anticipate suffering.
That requires memory, inference, modelling the future.
That requires a mind.
So when someone treats cows like they’re mindless or automatic, what they really mean is: “I haven’t paid attention.”
And then we did something worse
Here is the part nobody likes to talk about. We did not merely underestimate cows. We selectively bred them to be easier to control.
And we can measure it.
A large skull study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences compared modern cattle with their wild ancestor, the aurochs.
Domestic cattle have brains about 25% smaller.
Not only that.
The more human contact a breed has, the smaller the brain tends to be. Dairy breeds, handled constantly and selected for docility, show the biggest reduction. Beef breeds, smaller again. Bullfighting cattle, left largely alone and bred for aggression, have brains much closer to wild size.
Read that again.
The animals we manage most intensely have the smallest brains. The ones we want to defend themselves keep more of theirs. This is not evolution. This is selection for compliance.
We bred fear and resistance out of them. We favoured the quiet ones. The ones who didn’t fight back. The ones who stood still.
Then we pointed at the outcome and said: “See? They’re basically biological machines.”
It is like putting someone in solitary confinement for a lifetime and then mocking them for poor social skills.
Confinement does not just restrict bodies. It degrades minds
Take a predictive, learning animal.
Then:
▫️remove stimulation
▫️remove choice
▫️remove novelty
▫️remove control
What happens?
They do not become less capable. They become resigned.
Research links barren environments with:
▫️reduced curiosity
▫️fearfulness
▫️depression-like behaviour
▫️passivity
▫️learned helplessness
In other words, the exact behaviours people use as “proof” that cows lack depth. We create the psychological damage.
Then we call it nature.
Tool use is not the miracle. The miracle is that it survived us
Veronika matters for one reason.
Not because she is exceptional.
But because she shows what leaks through despite everything.
Despite:
▫️domestication
▫️selective breeding
▫️confinement
▫️commodification
Despite generations of engineering cows into milk machines. A cow still looks at a problem, selects an object, and uses it like a tool. That should not make us marvel at her intelligence. It should make us question our arrogance.
How much have we missed?
How many abilities have been suppressed by the environments we impose?
How many minds have we flattened and then blamed?
The headlines ask:
Are we underestimating how smart cows are?
That is too gentle.
We did not underestimate.
We dismissed.
Because it is easier to exploit someone you have decided is an object. If cows are thinking, planning, predicting individuals, then they are not units of production.
They are not resources.
They are not property.
They are someone.
And someone who can pick up a broom and solve their own problem is not here for us.
They are here with us.
We are not special.
We are just the species that convinced itself we were.
Veronika did not prove cows are intelligent. She proved we have been wilfully blind.