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| Every once in a while, I'll still find something worthwhile from Cracked. This one isn't really one of them. ‘Far Side’ Fans Freak Out As the ‘Cow Tools’ Prophecy Is Finally Fulfilled  Gary Larson was right about cows and their tools For those benighted individuals who are not familiar with The Far Side, or if you don't remember the particular comic, it has its own entry on Wikipedia, a more reliable source than Cracked.We finally understand the single most confounding Far Side panel that Gary Larson ever put to paper. I can't recall if I saw the panel the day it was published or not. I do know that I've seen it multiple times since then; I had a boss who gave me a Far Side calendar for my holiday bonus every year, and it's likely I saw it in one of those, at least. What I do know is that, despite what the linked article or Wiki page proclaims, I understood the joke perfectly: that if cows could fabricate tools, the tools would be primitive-looking. Maybe this is because I'm a comedic genius. More likely, it's because I've spent way more time than I probably should contemplating the meaning of tool manufacture and use, and its connection to sentience. “Cow Tools” wasn’t a punchline — it was a prediction. Oh, it was not. In 1982, the fandom of the surreal, science-fiction-adjacent comic series erupted in uproar upon the publication of a Far Side strip so infamous that it has its own Wikipedia Page: “Cow Tools,” a single panel showing a bipedal cow examining a table of crude, oddly shaped instruments with nothing more than the title explaining the scene, remains the most divisive half-meme, half-myth that Larson ever unintentionally unleashed on his fans. "Science-fiction-adjacent?" No. The only genre I've been more immersed in than comedy is science fiction, and Larson, however brilliant he is, isn't science fiction. Okay, maybe a few strips explore science fiction concepts. This isn't one of them. It's simple absurdity. Okay, no absurdity is ever truly "simple." Calling it "surreal" is more on the mark. Genre is, however, a marketing thing, and we shouldn't be too obsessed with putting things in little boxes (that's kind of a pun because The Far Side was drawn in little boxes). Is that other great comic from the 1980s, Calvin and Hobbes, science fiction because Calvin likes to take on the character of Spaceman Spiff? No. While it doesn't reach the levels of absurdity that The Far Side did, both strips were, at base, about imagination's intersection with reality. Given how the legacy of “Cow Tools” is characterized by a complete disbelief that Larson’s joke was as simple as, “if cows had tools they would look like this,” many Far Side fans found themselves in shock and amazement when this video of a remarkably intelligent bovine grabbing a stick with its teeth and using it to scratch its crotch went viral late last week: Now, here's where my internet paranoia restricts me. I have multiple scripts, widgets, and add-ons that are specifically set to keep me from seeing any embedded content from the platform now known as X, and thereby keep it from tracking me. So I can't see the promised video. I could, of course, turn these scripts off, or use another browser, but that would defeat the entire purpose of having them in the first place. Perhaps you can see the content. I'm pretty sure I don't need to; the description above, "...a remarkably intelligent bovine grabbing a stick with its teeth and using it to scratch its crotch..." suffices to explain what's got my fellow semi-intelligent apes all riled up. 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 doesn’t allow them to scratch. So, this is nothing new. We've known for a remarkably long time that other species use "tools," where "tools" is interpreted loosely. Beavers build dams. Corvids hook food with paper clips. Some animals use rocks to open delicious oysters. Now, when they start using tools to make other tools, then my philosophy might need adjusting. A raven using a paper clip is remarkable, but we're not about to start a space race with them. If, on the other hand, they started manufacturing the things, then we can start talking about functional sentience. However, to see an astoundingly intelligent bovine like the one pictured in the above video actually pick up an implement that perfectly resembles the instrument depicted in “Cow Tools” is absolutely uncanny. I will grant that, compared to some humans I know, such as ones who didn't get the "Cow Tools" joke in the first place, cows are "astoundingly intelligent." Again, though, wake me up when they start building steam engines. “The cartoon was intended to be an exercise in silliness. While I have never met a cow who could make tools, I felt sure that if I did, they (the tools) would lack something in sophistication and resemble the sorry specimens shown in this cartoon,” Larson admitted in his press release. So, just to be perfectly clear here: cows still can't make tools. I mean, some of them make good leather jackets, but that sentence uses an entirely different definition of the verb "to make." Since I'm being pedantic, I also feel the need to point out that "cow" refers to the female of the species. The male is, as everyone knows, a "bull." They are, as far as I'm aware, the only species that doesn't have a group name for both genders. Like, a female pig is a sow, and a male pig is, somewhat less famously, a boar. But "pig" describes both sexes. There's no such generic for the bovine animal, except "bovine," which is really an adjective, or "cattle," which is a group noun. Point being, bulls still can't make tools, either. They don't need tools to fuck up your shit, or be delicious on a dinner plate. All of which is to say that, like all comedy, if it has to be explained, it ceases to be comedy. |
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