Rosa Rubicondior: Holy Cow! - Clever Veronika Refutes Creationism

Friday, 27 March 2026

Holy Cow! - Clever Veronika Refutes Creationism

This cow uses tools like a primate—and scientists are stunned | ScienceDaily

If humans evolved intelligence, why are there still creationists?

This is a question that evolutionary biologists struggle to answer, with the best attempt probably by Francis Collins, who explained that "Young Earth Creationism has reached a point of intellectual bankruptcy, both in its science and in its theology". (Francis Collins - The Language of God).

Paradoxically though, creationists often cite human intelligence as evidence for the special creation of mankind, separate from the other animals, who, according to creationist mythology, don't display what they define as evidence of intelligence - love, aesthetic appreciation, creativity, etc, as opposed to science which includes things like tool selection, adaptation and use, as characteristics of intelligence and cognitive ability.

So, it will be interesting to see how creationist explain the following video evidence of intelligence in a cow - namely, the ability to select a tool for an appropriate task and its ability to adapt how it uses that tool for maximal effectiveness.

This evidence comes in the form of a paper in Current Biology by Antonio J. Osuna-Mascaró and Alice M.I. Auersperg of the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, Austria:

Summary
Imagine the tools a cow would make. This idea, humorously illustrated in Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoon, captures a widespread assumption: cows are neither problem-solvers nor tool users. In science, as in culture, livestock species are often cognitively underestimated, reinforced by their utilitarian role and persistent mind-denial biases associated with meat consumption¹. Despite over 10,000 years of domestication, research on cattle cognition remains scarce and confined to applied contexts such as productivity and welfare². Tool use, while rarely observed, offers a stringent test of cognitive flexibility. Defined as the manipulation of an external object to achieve a goal via a mechanical interface³, tooling ranges from species-typical routines to innovative, problem-specific acts^4,5. We report here our experimental demonstration of flexible egocentric tooling in a pet cow (Bos taurus), Veronika, who uses a deck brush to self-scratch. Across randomized trials, she preferred the bristled end but switched to the stick end when targeting softer lower-body areas. This adaptive deployment of tool features reveals multi-purpose tool use not previously reported in non-primate mammals. Our findings broaden the taxonomic scope of flexible tool use and invite a reassessment of livestock cognition.

(Top left) Broom end targeted to a top area of the body (thurl). (Bottom left) Stick end targeted to a bottom area of the body (udder). (Right) Number of tooling events in which Veronika used either the broom or the stick end of the tool to target the top or bottom of her body. Bars are colored by body area: top in orange-terracotta and bottom in bluish-green. A Fisher’s exact test revealed a significant association between tool type and body area (p < 0.001), as indicated above the bars.

Osuna-Mascaró A, Auersperg A
Flexible use of a multi-purpose tool by a cow
Current Biology, 36, R44-R45

Creationists like to imagine that human beings stand apart from the rest of life, endowed with a uniquely special intelligence that no other animal can meaningfully approach. But this study leaves that old anthropocentric conceit looking increasingly threadbare. Veronika was not merely bumping into an object by chance; she was reported to select different ends of the same brush for different parts of her body and to vary her movements to suit the task. That is flexible, goal-directed behaviour, and exactly the sort of thing that becomes awkward for anyone committed to the idea that intelligence was handed to humans as a one-off supernatural gift.

In reality, this is much more in line with evolution than with special creation. Evolution predicts continuity, not an unbridgeable gulf: minds, like bodies, are modified from what went before, so we should expect other animals to show at least some of the capacities that humans like to imagine belong to us alone. The authors note that research on cattle cognition has been surprisingly sparse despite more than 10,000 years of domestication, and that livestock are often cognitively underestimated. In that light, the real lesson here may be not that this cow is impossibly exceptional, but that human prejudice has been blinding us to abilities that were there all along.

So this is not just an amusing anecdote about a clever cow. It is another small but telling crack in the creationist fantasy of human exceptionalism. Time and again, the traits once paraded as uniquely human or uniquely “designed” — tool use, planning, problem-solving, social learning, even culture in some form — turn out not to be exclusive possessions at all, but parts of a broader evolutionary inheritance distributed across the animal world in different degrees. The pattern is exactly what common descent would lead us to expect, and exactly what special creation struggles to explain.

And perhaps that is the most damaging point of all for creationist rhetoric. Every time science looks more carefully at the living world, the supposed line dividing “man” from “beast” becomes a little harder to defend. What shrinks is not evolution’s explanatory power, but the shrinking refuge of those who keep insisting that humans were specially made and set apart from the rest of nature. This cow, calmly and methodically using a tool, is yet another reminder that humanity is not separate from the animal kingdom, but very much a part of it.

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