Great Job, Internet!: "Cow Tools" finally came true

44 years after a Far Side comic shocked the world, new evidence suggests that cows may in fact use tools.

By Drew Gillis  |  January 20, 2026 | 12:32pm
Photo by Frédéric Soltan/Corbis via Getty Images
Aux News Great Job, Internet!
Great Job, Internet!:

Years before the World Wide Web was even a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye, Gary Larson created a comic that would perplex and delight the internet for decades to come. Titled “Cow Tools,” the 1982 The Far Side comic depicts a cow standing in front of four hard-to-identify objects. For many readers, it wasn’t immediately clear what the joke was, which gave the comic a massive second life when it took off on Twitter from 2012 on, as Know Your Meme documents. But perhaps it was never a joke; perhaps it was a prophecy. 

Yesterday, The Guardian published an article entitled “Back-scratching bovine leads scientists to reassess intelligence of cows,” led with a photo of Veronika, a Brown Swiss cow, apparently using a stick to scratch her back. The article documents Witgar Wiegele’s, a farmer and baker from Nötsch im Gailtal, Austria, discovery of his cow Veronika’s “extraordinary intelligence.”  Videos of Veronika using a stick or a broom to scratch her back eventually made it in front of researchers at Vienna’s University of Veterinary Medicine. As Dr. Antonio Osuna Mascaró says, “It was a cow using an actual tool… We got everything ready and jumped in the car to visit.” 

Dr. Osuna Mascaró’s enthusiasm was echoed on Bluesky, especially among the “Cow Tools” community. The account “Cow Tools Daily” had an especially good day with the discovery, writing, “to be a gary larson is to be cursed with being correct too early.” Dr. Osuna Mascaró also got in on the action with the account, writing, “We have lived alongside cows for nearly 10,000 years. We breed them and exploit them. It is now, only now, that we have discovered THEY CAN USE TOOLS.” Place your bets now for which Far Side comic will become a reality next, and in the meantime, you can see Veronika picking up the broom with her tongue in The Guardian‘s article. 

 
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