Watching them munch on grass or congregating under a tree, it’s  underestimate the intelligence of cows. They just look so … contented.

But new research challenges our assumptions about bovine nous, and may just make you think twice next time you’re thinking of ordering a rare scotch fillet.

At the centre of the study was a 13-year-old Swiss Brown cow named Veronika, who appears to live a charmed life in the Austrian countryside with her owner, organic farmer, baker and animal lover Witgar Wiegele.

Wiegele keeps Veronika as a pet, and noticed that she would occasionally pick up sticks and use them to scratch herself.

When a pair of Vienna researchers saw a video of this behaviour, they were so intrigued that they travelled to meet Veronika and carry out a series of extensive trials to test the extent of her skills.

“When I saw the footage, it was immediately clear that this was not accidental,” cognitive biologist Alice Auersperg said.

“This was a meaningful example of tool use in a species that is rarely considered from a cognitive perspective.”

Auersperg and colleague Antonio Osuna-Mascaró put a deck brush on the ground in front of Veronika, presenting it in a range of different orientations and recording which end she chose to pick it up by and which area of her body she brushed each time.

They were excited to find that her choices appeared anything but random.

“As we predicted, she used the broom end more often than the stick end to scratch herself, and when she uses tools she does so to reach body parts that are otherwise unreachable,” Osuna-Mascaró said.

“But then we found something interesting and unexpected.

“Veronika used each end of the tool in a different way. She preferred to use the blunt stick for the soft skin of her lower body (which tends to be more sensitive), and she strongly preferred the hard bristles of the broom for her upper back with the skin is thick.”

Veronika knows one end of a brush from the other. Photos: Alice Auersperg and Antonio Osuna-Mascaró

He said this could qualify as the “egocentric” use of a multipurpose tool – “something extremely rare in nature, so much that there is only solid evidence of it in chimpanzees”.

Auersperg  and Osuna-Mascaró said that despite cows having been domesticated for thousands of years, their cognitive capabilities had begun to attract attention only recently.

While Veronika is “certainly special”, they don’t think she’s particularly different to other cows and are looking for similar cases.

The researchers point to American cartoonist Gary Larson’s famous illustration “Cow Tools” to highlight just how much humans have underestimated cows.

The cartoon – considered to be one of Larson’s most confusing and possibly hated Far Side cartoons – shows a cow standing behind a table of tools (some of which don’t look like tools at all). Larson has said he intended to show that if a cow was to make tools they would “lack something in sophistication”.

“[Veronika] did not fashion tools like the cow in Gary Larson’s cartoon, but she selected, adjusted, and used one with notable dexterity and flexibility,” the researchers wrote.

“Perhaps the real absurdity lies not in imagining a tool-using cow, but in assuming such a thing could never exist.”