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.