Scientists investigating video of a cow using tools say their findings could expand the list of animals capable of tool use.

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.

  • ɯᴉuoʇuɐ@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    42·
    7 hours ago

    Doesn’t the fact that this is news also kind of diminish its importance? We’ve lived with cows for so many generations, there are millions of cows out there, and there’s just one single cow that we’ve seen being this smart. Most of them would still count as stupid, if this is proof of intelligence.

    OTOH I also get the impression this is news in part because we(?) kind of overrated the trait of using tools and doing basic planning as a sign of substantial intelligence, assuming a large technical/biological gap between being and not being able to do it. Animal brains are, I would suppose, not so hard-wired and predefined as we thought, and individual specimen can be more or less creative and smart.

    • thinkercharmercoderfarmer@slrpnk.netEnglish
      5·
      4 hours ago

      I’m not sure why it being a newly recorded observation would diminish it in any way. It’s new evidence that cows are capable of what we (humans broadly) previously thought them incapable of. It’s important because it’s a concrete indicator that there’s more going on in cow brains than humans have generally assumed. How much more is an open question. Are other cows capable of tool use? Probably. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if there are dairy farmers in the world who’ve seen cows use similar scratching tools and just never bothered to record it, if they even noticed it at all. I’ve only had limited contact with cows but they aren’t stupid, IME they are generally just content as long as they’re warm, dry, and have food. In the US the vast majority of cows are restricted to the point where they wouldn’t even have access to implements they could use as tools, much less the freedom to learn how to use them. That doesn’t mean they’re stupid.

      • ɯᴉuoʇuɐ@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        3 hours ago

        It’s new evidence that cows are capable of what we (humans broadly) previously thought them incapable of. It’s important because it’s a concrete indicator that there’s more going on in cow brains than humans have generally assumed.

        As I said, perhaps this is surprising only because we understand brains overly mechanically. As if it’s assumed that there’s a hard “can/can’t do” switch for particular mental actions, while in reality any ability may be a result of various factors within the individual brain and outside of it aligning together (including, of course, the cow in question being a pet, so having a very comfortable lifestyle). If people can vary wildly in their mental abilities and inclinations, why wouldn’t animals?

        • thinkercharmercoderfarmer@slrpnk.netEnglish
          2·
          3 hours ago

          I guess I don’t understand what you mean then, especially the first sentence. I think there’s a pretty broad agreement that we have a very limited understanding of how brains work, and that our current benchmarks of sophistication (tool use being one) aren’t the last word on brain capabilities, they’re just (relatively) easily defined behaviors that we can use to categorize what abilities different animals have at their disposal to survive. You also can’t really demonstrate that an animal (or a species) can’t use a tool, you can only know if an animal can use tools by observing tool use, which we have now done with at least one cow. Which is pretty cool.

    • Grass@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      4 hours ago

      If we penned 99% of regularly observed humans in with nothing but slop food and titty suckers and then funneled them into a room to get spiked through the skull at the end of the life eating size would it make you unintelligent?

      • ɯᴉuoʇuɐ@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        3 hours ago

        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.worksEnglish
          4·
          2 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.