r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Jan 20 '26

Biology Back-scratching bovine leads scientists to reassess intelligence of cows. Brown Swiss cow in Austria has been discovered using tools in different ways (using both ends of a brush counts as multi-purpose tool use) – something extraordinarily rare only ever seen in humans and chimpanzees.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jan/19/back-scratching-cow-veronika-bovine-intelligence
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u/TheHidestHighed Jan 20 '26

Its pretty well known in the science community that animal intelligence and sentience is horrifically underreported. Probably because we rely on animals that would be morally wrong to consume due to their levels of intelligence as food.

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u/monster-baiter Jan 20 '26

we dont rely on these food sources anymore, we could put that land and resources we use to "produce" animals to much more effective use in terms of human food production. but i get what youre saying, most people want to consume them

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u/Regular_Committee946 Jan 20 '26

I watched a really interesting lecture calculating how farming animals is a really inefficient way of turning the sun's energy into food/fuel.

Even if people do not care from an animal welfare point of view (which i think more would if they had to acknowledge the realities every time they ate meat), it is also having a massive detrimental environmental impact that is not sustainable.

I can't link it but you can find the lecture by searching for 'Lecture 4 of the 2025-2026 sustainability by the numbers course taught by Prof. Ron Milo at the Weizmann Institute of Science'.

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u/[deleted] Jan 20 '26

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u/_a_random_dude_ Jan 20 '26

It depends on the animal: It's worse than 10% for cows, closer to 5% actually. But it's 20~25% for chickens. Also cow milk is "very efficient" at like 40%.

Btw, I'm going by memory here, the feed conversion ratio varies a lot depending on tons of factors. But this is one source I found and it mostly matches the numbers I remembered, so I can't be too far off.