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- cross-posted to:
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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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Oh no, not more tool users!
How will humans continue to pretend that they’re so special and God’s gift to the Earth if we go around proving we’re not so special!?
I heard a fascinating notion on the radio the other day - the thing that makes us unique as a species is that we’re storytellers. Other animals can teach each other things, like whales and dolphins teaching their young how to hunt fish, or crows warning each other that one particular person is shady; but no other species invents Santa Claus to demonstrate that one should give for the joy of giving.
Humans have a unique capacity to not only understand complex, abstract ideas about how we should interact with each other; but also to reinvent and transmit these ideas in an evolutionary eyeblink. This memetic transmission and interpretation of societal ideas is having an impact on the earth as profound as when genetic transmission came along. And it’s done through our capacity to tell each other stories, about how things might be and how we think they should be.
I wonder how much of our sense of self, as an ongoing narrative, stems from that ability to invent a story.
I think the ability to amass, retain, and augment information learned by our ancestors is our killer feature. Storytelling is an important part of it, using rhythm and rhyme to help us remember and pass on those stories, being able to encode those stories as art and writing, they’re all ways to make it easier for the next generation to get up to speed quickly and then push the boundaries of understanding even further, instead of every generation having to relearn all the basics the hard way. It’s not perfect and it’s still incredibly lossy, but I think that’s why we broke out and became, I think it’s fair to say, the dominant lifeform on the planet. Is that the bar for sentience? I don’t think so, but I don’t really have a better one.
Also we invented santa claus to teach kids that every authority figure in your life will willingly engage in a conspiracy to gaslight and bribe you in order to make you behave the way they want you to.
Our tool use and application of our intelligence is still quite unique. Special is a loaded term, but humans are very different from all other life forms on this planet - and of course, in many ways, still very much the same.
We’re only so different because we already murdered or fucked the species that were similar enough to be a threat.
Also, scientific advancement has been so rapid that it is wholly inaccurate to compare modern humans to apes and then gesture to technology… It wasn’t even 400 years ago that Newton was explaining what gravity is, and 400 years is a damn blip on the evolutionary scale of a species that can live 100+ years.
It wasn’t even 400 years ago that Newton was explaining what gravity is, and 400 years is a damn blip on the evolutionary scale of a species that can live 100+ years.
But that’s just further proof that we are special. In just some 5000 years we broke the nature meta countless times, and we’re doing it again and again faster and faster, we’re so fucking smart we’re doing the Paleoproterozoic extinction (“Oxygen holocaust”) all over again.
No it’s not. No it is not proof that we are special. We have NO IDEA what differences make such things unique. To pretend it is our gift alone is to be a self-centered piece of shit.
We have NO IDEA what differences make such things unique.
What do you mean by this? Make what things unique? Why do we have to understand the differences to be sure that the outcome is unique?
To pretend it is our gift alone is to be a self-centered piece of shit.
I also think you’re a piece of shit, if I may respond directly to this indirect insult; now, can we get back to talking normally?
Cow tools!
Finally, Gary Larson has been vindicated!
Turns out their all just scratching tools.
Cows have their priorities straight.
Cows with guns
The title seems to suggest the scientists are disputing the claim that the cow is using tools, but the article itself says the opposite.
I’m also a bit confused on why any of this is news. Cow scratchers are a thing you can just buy. Cows readily use them.
A cow using a scratcher is doing something that provides an immediate reward. The cow that selects and manipulates an appropriate stick is planning ahead for a future reward.
I think they make a distinction between acting on an object and merely using the environment. The first requires more agency, I guess.
I guess we’re used to hearing “this was not an accident” as meaning “this was rigged”, but for scientists it translates more to something like “thank god, it’s a real finding and not just one of those weird things that happen every now and then”.
That quote by itself is fine, but when they combine it with “unravel” and “supposed” it puts a different interpretation on it.
I usually equate “unravel” with “tear apart”, but maybe they meant something more like “unpack”.
Yeah the title is clickbaity for sure.
I dunno—in this case, confirmed tool use seems more noteworthy than debunked tool use.
Maybe the implication of a dispute just sounds more dramatic.
To me it sounded like someone was trying to manipulate the video or the findings or something. They could have gone with the much more straightforward “researchers observe signs of tool use in cow”, but they didn’t.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 lifeeating size would it make you unintelligent?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…
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.
