The Dawn of Cow Tech - DTNS Weekend

0:03Hey, welcome to a special Sunday edition of DT &S weekend. And don't have a cow. Dr. Nikki is here to talk literally about a cow that's been using a tool that has been in the news. I guess, Nikki, this is the dawn of cow tech. Yeah, and we're here to record it on DTNS. We are here to document it and explain it. You know, we talk all the time about what is tech and how far back can we go? And I think this lands perfectly in that. So what counts as a tool when we're, before we even get to whether Veronica the cow, by the way, it's Veronica with a K to distinguish it from any other Veronica's, you know, such as Belmont or any others.

0:53It is Veronica with a K. Veronica has been documented using a tool. But before we get to that, what counts as a tool? so all tools are technology but not all technologies are tools because a tool well technology is when you use knowledge to maybe create a solution to something in the general world and sometimes the something you create is a tool but not always and the tool is when a human or an animal non-human animal uses an external object for the goal for a certain goal and this has a mechanical interface. So that's a very technical kind of broad definition, but you take something out of your environment or maybe not of your environment, use it for something, and it has to be mechanical.

1:41Yeah, I just can't, using my finger is not a tool use. That's just using my finger. But if I pick up a wrench and then use it to hit my television to get it to work again, I've used a tool. Exactly. Maybe not in the most optimal way, but that's not what we're measuring. Right, right. Yeah, we know that humans can use tools and high-tech devices like podcast microphones, but lots of animals also are capable of using more rudimentary technology in the form of tools. Yeah, okay. So that's what a tool is. Now I am properly ready to determine whether what Veronica the cow used was a tool or not. Yeah.

2:24And before we get to Veronica, to keep kind of leading you on, to place this, a lot of people think that like tool use and animals is a sign of intelligence. And it's a little bit yes and no. So we know that different animals can use tool use, and we'll get to that in a second. But the amount of cognition needed to use different tools varies differently between animals. So sometimes it's instinctive. Sometimes it requires trial and error and learning. And so it can be an indicator of cognitive ability, but it's not always. So when we're thinking about this, Tom, do you know off the top of your head some animals that use tools?

3:03I don't remember which primate can stick a stick down into the ground to get the insects. Yeah, orangutans and chimpanzees. Okay, that's why now I feel better for not remembering which one. And humans, yeah. Yeah, that's the earliest story that I remember hearing about, like an animal, a non-human animal using a tool. Do bees use tool? I feel like bees use tools. There was a paper about bees playing and rolling little balls. Yeah. I think that counts as tool use because they're using something from their environment to get a goal, which could be play. So I didn't even have that one on the list.

3:44So good, good call. Thank you this week in science.

3:50That's the only ones I could think of off the top of my head that I remember. Okay. Are there a bunch of others? You did the two extremities. There's more than you would think. Okay. I think this one you'll be familiar with with birds. So there's a lot of corvids and crows that can use like sticks or hooks that can like solve puzzles or like pick grubs out of holes. Yeah, yeah. That's a good one. Also, there's vultures that can drop rocks on top of bones to shatter them and eat the marrow, which is pretty badass. Okay. Yeah. There are hawks or I think it's a type of eagle in Australia that strategically can spread fire with flaming branches to like chase out mice, which is really cool.

4:28That's like art of war stuff for the birds. I like it. So I'm going across the whole range in no particular order, but otters break sea urchins with rocks on their bellies. And they have little pockets for their rocks. So that's a tool, even though it's instinctual. Sure, sure. And that's really cool because they use special kinds of rocks that have special traces. So we can trace this back archaeologically to when otters started doing this. Yeah. To find the otter rocks. And there's that whole online store that sells the special rocks to the otters. And it's all the ecosystem. Otters on? No, wait.

5:01Otter Instagram is just a bunch of rocks. It's just rocks. Michael Rock. We also know that invertebrates, so you mentioned bees, so invertebrates can do tool use. Ants, if you've heard of leaf cutter ants, they can not only cut leaves and transport them, but they can carry seeds in these leaves. Oh, so it's not the cutting of the leaf that's the tool. That's built in, right? Yeah. It's the, I cut the leaf and use the leaf for something. That's interesting. Exactly. Octopi can hide in shells, so they use different shells for hiding. That's a tool. They're smart. Yeah. And the kind of bigger-brained animals, elephants tend to use relatively a high amount of tools.

5:42They tend to use branches as fly swatters, for example. This is close to what our cow is doing. And then dolphins, there is kind of talk about them using sponges to get high. I don't know how that is. So I instead use the example of they use shells to trap prey where they'll chase fish into some big snail shells. Okay, so they're creating a trap. Yeah, yeah. The sponge thing is not quite confirmed. That's the dark dolphin web, if you want to look up the sponge. And there's loads more animals, but this is just like the big ones that we know of. That's a few. But no cows up until now, apparently.

6:16No cows until now, no. Okay. So what's Veronica, with a K, doing that has caught the attention of those who want to decide whether an animal is using a tool or not? Yeah. So it's a K because Veronica is an Austrian cow. And a new paper in Current Biology from this month from the Medical University of Vienna demonstrates flexible tool use by a cow for the first time. So there were some anecdotal, maybe like videos of like, oh, yeah, maybe this is tool use. But they observed it and then did a bunch of measurements to make sure that this is in fact tool use. Veronica taught herself how to pick up a stick or a scrub brush with her mouth and then use it to itch her back and her belly.

7:00There's a video abstract of this and I highly recommend watching it. It's adorable. And she's in the mountains and there's like church bells in the background. It's very Heidi. Oh, very much. Yeah, yeah. And the part that makes this really cool is that she's able to use both the scrubby end of the brush and the stick end, depending on what she wants to scratch. So there's this like adaptable multipurpose factor. It's a multi-tool. It's a cow multi-tool. It's a multi-tool. It's a multi-tool. And that's actually really rare in animal tool use. So that's very interesting. Yeah, that was actually the more impressive part because some of these, now that you mentioned them, I've seen the otter thing and I'm like, yeah, I think that does count as tool use.

7:43Instinctive versus learned. It's not exactly as impressive as maybe you would want. Whereas this, you clearly see Veronica the cow pick up the brush, start itching and you're like, oh, okay, that's interesting. But then move it and use the other end and like, oh, but this part needs the other end. And I'm like, oh, so that cow is thinking about what the brush can do and then adapting how it uses the tool. I don't know if that counts as a more sophisticated level of tool. It is, actually. It's a big difference cognitively to kind of use and adapt. And the fact that there's two different uses of the tool.

8:22And, like, she itches her belly with the blunt end of the stick or her skin is softer. and then when her height is like harder on her back she uses the broom more and they like measure this because the broom is more spiny and yeah it's like scratchy yeah and they also um did they did like 70 different trials to try and figure this out and they placed the broom in different orientations so that she wasn't always picking up like the brush and first every time but she would like manipulate it with her mouth and turn it and stuff so um there really is like a kind of thought process um happening there and they call this goal-directed self-scratching which i too have participated in but uh i'm not a cow yeah uh that that that is really impressive uh and i i get why that would make the news uh not not just because it's a really cute cow video that would be enough for it to make the news to be honest but but that it's it's impressive the more you watch it um is then the next question does this mean this cow is smarter than the average cow or could other cows do this is this a sign of cow intelligence like they didn't you know first of all what's really cool on top of this like clearly being a choice factor uh the fact that this multi-purpose use of a single tool has only been reported in chimpanzees otherwise is kind of a big deal uh although i would want to see veronica in a herd of other cows and see if she can teach them this to use i don't see why not um they didn't test for that but i think clearly the cognitive capacity is there so potentially maybe young cows could learn to do this and this happens a lot like with elephants for example in herd structures you'll have different or with the dolphins there's different like pods that have different tricks that other ones don't you see you hear this also with orcas like them wearing the salmon hats um yeah and this is just like a trend within this pod because they teach all each other how to do it i guess that's kind of a tool except we don't know what it's for it's decorative fashion yeah um so is is it that she's smarter than other cows i think the better way to see it is we underestimate cows and there's a this this paper kind of has this tone of like we're bad because we never thought that cows were smart and it's like yeah fair uh i mean we do use them for meat and production so maybe we're not all about testing their intelligence and this kind of gets me into this thought process which we do with my intro to neuroscience class a lot which is what is intelligence and how do you measure it in animals right do you have some idea i'm sorry to put you on the spot no that wasn't even intentional.

11:02I was a, I am moved by your concern. I minored in philosophy as an undergrad. So I took a bunch of those philosophy classes where they deal with like how, how, what separates the human from the non-human, you know, what is intelligence, you know, can you see intelligence in animals and is there a difference in the intelligence? Uh, and usually it came down, depending on what philosopher you're talking about, it had to do with the ability to conceive of yourself from the outside, right? And one of the reasons I knew about some of the tool use was that in these classes, they would say like, yeah, you can find examples of tool use, but can a dog look itself in the mirror and not only recognize that it's them, but then use that somehow, right?

11:53This is perfect. Yes. So partially, yes, but I'll get to why that's kind of flawed in animal experimentation. Sure. So the general definition for intelligence and can be adapted, but it's the having the enough mental capacity to acquire knowledge and apply it, perceive information, retain it, learn from it and apply it in a context that can change. So when you define that, it could be that, you know, bees have intelligence. and I teach comparative neuroanatomy so we think a lot about human intelligence versus animal intelligence and animal experiments so you know there's been a lot of experiments also like famously in the 60s on dolphins where we thought maybe dolphins like were smarter than humans but we just needed to break through to find out how because we're not as smart as they are we couldn't do it I mean maybe so the issue is that we frame everything on how do you test human intelligence and just apply that to animals.

12:49So something like a sticker test where you put the sticker on your forehead and if you look in the mirror and you like try and take it off, if you're a monkey or a dog or whatever, you can recognize that that's you and you know that like dogs and cats can't see each other in mirrors. But dogs and cats are not highly visual animals. Like our main sense is vision, but they rely way more on odors and you can't smell a mirror. So are we actually really testing that? Are we just testing what we think they should be doing? Yeah, should we invent the smell-o-mirror? And then suddenly they're like, oh, yeah, I totally know what to do now.

13:21So there's a lot of problems with figuring that out. And one of the ones with dolphins, which is my student's favorite, is that in the 60s, there's a scientist called Lily who really thought and in combination with Carl Sagan, devised an experiment to figure out if we could teach English to dolphins, then we could communicate with aliens. was kind of the like jump of like dolphins are really smart if we can communicate with them then you know we could do other things except it was the 60s so like they gave them lsd but they but they were settled on teaching them english like that's we have to speak english so they had this whole experiment and there's a whole npr episode about it you can listen to where they're trying to teach dolphins english and the problem first of all why english like why not chinese why not any other language and also dolphins don't have lips so it's really hard for them to make sounds out of their mouth they have a blowhole that they breathe through that they can't it doesn't have lips either so it like is kind of anatomically really hard to speak like if you go and listen to this npr episode the dolphin ends up they're trying to teach him to count to three and he clearly goes like me me me like he can count but he can't say three but he dips his blowhole into the water and goes like for three so like there's the cognition happening but just because he doesn't have lips he can't speak so right right kind of showing that like if you don't take the animal's brain and environment and like way of life into account and how it's different from us then you're not measuring what you think you're measuring yeah and and that's i think sometimes people tend to want to cast that as a moral issue of like And you're being bad to animals, which you can make that argument, but it doesn't help the science of it.

15:04The scientific argument is like, no, you're just getting bad data. Yeah, the data doesn't mean anything. That's like testing how many Mac OS apps you can install on Windows. Guess what? None. It's not going to work. Yeah, except if they're universal apps that have a wrapper and then somebody's like, you can't do this. And it starts to feel like this conversation of like, no, animals can't use tools, except that they also kind of do this. And it's like, well, if you measure it on the animal operating system, maybe you'll find more examples. That's a great parallel. Yeah, and there's lots of examples.

15:36Like we know we use mice as our main laboratory animals, and they're nocturnal. And like all the experiments are in bright light because we need light to see them. How is that throwing off every single experiment? There also are studies that show that they have less preference for male experimenters, potentially because they can smell certain hormones or pheromones or whatever. we don't have pheromones but something or like certain perfumes might throw them off and we can't smell that so we didn't even pay attention. So there's a whole field of study for this right so I guess to answer the question like is this cow intelligent I think no one ever thought to say that like scratching was like a really big deal for cows to the point of invention so we need to identify like what's important to a cow and like with their mouths or other ways to use tools how can they fix that.

16:24I think it's cool that that we got this out of a cow because i think in part the authors are correct that we underestimate livestock because historically and evolutionarily like they're livestock to us why do we care and in fact it's more better for us if we think they're not smart because then we can eat them then you don't feel as bad yeah when you're having that delicious steak um i i think i would classify this as a kind of intelligence, right? And I think that's where we're headed is, you know, the idea of is this intelligent or not is not a sufficient metric. It's not a binary system. We've learned enough now to know that there are levels of intelligence.

17:07Yes, not just within our own species, but just levels of displaying intelligent. And this clearly is an intelligent behavior. Like the cow isn't doing this randomly and being surprised that it's itching in a way. Like it's going after it on purpose. It makes sense. Yeah. And it kind of ticks this box that we have of like two-lears equals intelligence. But if you think about it on dairy farms, you tend to, I don't know if you've seen this, but there's like these big, kind of like when you go to the car wash and there's those big wheels with the scrubs on them, they give these to cows to go itch themselves on.

17:41So this is, I mean, this would also kind of be tool use, except they're just like rubbing against it but it's the same principle of like they go and seek something out in the environment to uh have this goal so we could have maybe thought about this before but for us as humans it means something to have a physical tool like stone rocks like it's just kind of embedded in how we think about things so that's a good point um it kind of maybe this gives us the opportunity to reconsider a little bit cows and other arduedactyls and other species of what we thought before. Yeah. However, it does mean I don't need to start a whole new segment on cow tech yet for the Daily Tech News show.

18:22I mean, listen, if you could get me some funding, I'll start a cow tech experiment for you. Just do the iPad for cows. Yeah, I just don't need to do the reviews for anything but the brush yet. Yeah, you have one tool right now that you can review and then just finish, close that segment. I wonder if we can get Veronica the cow to be on Live With It to discuss her experience. You know, I'm going to Austria, so I can ask. Would you, yeah. I can interview Veronica. See if you can interview Veronica. That would be great. Dr. Nicky, this was fantastic. And I really enjoyed coming up with puns for cows while we were talking.

19:00And also learning about Veronica and seeing the cow and discussing all of this. Thanks for bringing the story. I appreciate it. Yeah, of course. I'm happy to come here and talk about animal brains always. And you can find more on my website at NicoleAckermans.com and same handle on Blue Sky. Thanks, everybody, for supporting the show, whether it's DTNS.substack.com or Patreon.com slash DTNS. You can get the show ad free there plus bonus episodes as well. Thanks, everybody. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you again on Monday. Bye, everybody.

19:42The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.