Scientists have been forced to rethink the intelligence of cattle after an Austrian cow named Veronika displayed an impressive – and until now undocumented – knack for tool use.
Witgar Wiegele, an organic farmer and baker from a small town in Carinthia near the Italian border, keeps Veronika as a pet and noticed that she occasionally played with sticks and used them to scratch her body.
Word soon got around and before long a video clip of the cow’s behaviour reached biologists in Vienna who specialise in animal intelligence. They immediately grasped the importance of the footage. “It was a cow using an actual tool,” said Dr Antonio Osuna Mascaró at the city’s University of Veterinary Medicine. “We got everything ready and jumped in the car to visit.”
Veronika is far from making even misshapen tools, but her prowess in using them has impressed nonetheless. Over seven sessions of 10 trials, the researchers witnessed 76 instances of tool use as she grabbed the broom to scratch otherwise unreachable regions. Using both ends of the brush counts as multi-purpose tool use, the scientists say, which is extraordinarily rare. Beyond humans, it has only been shown convincingly in chimpanzees.
Any other case where you cause unnecessary harm to someone while “respecting” them? And if so, then what’s that respect worth?
War.
You can absolutely respect an enemy while throwing all sorts of horrible stuff at them…
In that case you are either on the defending side, in which case the harm is not unnecessary or you are on the attacking side, which I can see no respect in.
Unnecessary harm means housing hundreds or thousands of animals and birds in massive barns without access to the outside environment. It’s no different than having pets, where you care for them, feed them and take them for walks. It doesn’t mean you can never kill them for food if needed.
That’s what respect means.
That’s the point, we don’t need to kill them for food, which makes it unnecesary harm.
We don’t need to kill plants for food either.
I disagree but to each their own.
Are the hundreds of millions of people who live without eating animals secretly reptiloid, or how do you make sense of that?
How do you “disagree”? We can disagree with opinions but weather or not humans need to eat animals to be healthy is a fact.
you don’t know what anyone else needs
I do actually. We need nutrients to survive, all of which can be obtained without hurting animals.
people need more than nutrients.
For example?