I have a farmer friend who regularly regales me with colourful stories of her cattle. Take the time when a beef cow called Noisette used her tongue to pull back the catch on the door of her pen so she could steal cattle nuts from the nearby feed bin. Or the time when she did it again, not to let herself out, but seemingly to stand back and watch as her freed compatriots “mooched around and caused mayhem.”

Where others see a herd of cows standing around looking bored, my friend sees a soap opera, with characters and plot twists. Cows, she tells me, learn quickly, bore easily and have an indefatigable penchant for mischief.

So when news broke of a cow called Veronika who uses a broom to scratch her butt, my friend was nonplussed. “I don’t think many dairy farmers would be surprised to learn that,” she says.

Writing in the journal Current Biology, researchers from the University of Veterinary Medicine in Austria described how Veronika, a 13-year-old brown Swiss pet cow, picks up the broom with her tongue then twists around and uses it to scratch the bits of her body she could otherwise........

© The Guardian