Comic Strips Technology

Cow Tools: The Proof Is Out There

About one of the most famous and confusing The Far Side panels by Gary Larson.

From Keegan Kelly at Cracked:

We finally understand the single most confounding Far Side panel that Gary Larson ever put to paper. “Cow Tools” wasn’t a punchline – it was a prediction.

So what we all took to be a pitchfork or a rake or a ????? turns out to be a, um, backscratcher for bovines.

Apparently, cattle are quite capable of manipulating their environments to achieve their goals, and farmers have long reported that their cows can and do use tools when there’s a particularly nagging itch in an area that their anatomy tragically does not allow them to scratch. However, to see an astoundingly intelligent bovine like the one pictured in the [attached] video actually pick up an implement that perfectly resembles the instrument depicted in “Cow Tools” is absolutely uncanny.

Video by way of Swamp Ape Science.

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Comments 2

  1. It makes me wonder what my chiwienie is going to do with the stick she purposely broke into a more convenient size. It’s not for scratching or even probing for termites.

  2. My mother avidly read The Far Side daily, and just as regularly claimed to not understand it. I remember when Cow Tools appeared in the paper; I found it uproariously funny but could not explain the joke at all.

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