Usually instinctive tool use is excluded. What scientists are interested in - and what engineers can’t replicate - is a creature understanding it’s environment well enough to use it against itself (so to speak) in a novel, creative way.

I know from our everyday perspective itching with a stick isn’t a giant intellectual leap, but how solids work, how limbs work and the type of contact required to itch would be difficult as hell if you put it in mathematical terms, let alone putting it together in the correct order to be a solution. The cow could just as easily have grabbed grass instead of wood, or used the short side of the stick.