Cow Tools is a cartoon from Gary Larson's The Far Side, published in October of 1982. It depicts a cow standing in front of a table of bizarre, misshapen implements with the caption "Cow tools". The cartoon confused many readers, who wrote or phoned in seeking an explanation of the joke. In response to the controversy, Larson issued a press release clarifying that the thrust of the cartoon was simply that, if a cow were to make tools, they would "lack something in sophistication". It has been described as "arguably the most loathed Far Side strip ever"

about

The single panel cartoon depicts a cow standing on its hind legs at a table, on which four oddly-shaped objects are placed. One object resembles a crude hand saw, while the others are more abstract. The caption simply reads "Cow tools".

reception

Immediately upon the cartoon's publication, Chronicle Features, which syndicated The Far Side, was inundated with queries from readers and newspaper editors seeking an explanation of the cartoon. According to the general manager of Chronicle Features, "the phone never stopped ringing for two days." Larson himself received hundreds of letters about "Cow Tools", some of which were reprinted in the 1989 anthology The Prehistory of The Far Side. In one letter, a reader from Texas wrote that they had shown the cartoon to "40-odd professionals with doctoral degrees", and none could understand it. Reflecting on the cartoon's reception, Larson suggested he had erred in making one of the tools resemble a crude saw, which misled many readers into believing that to understand the cartoon's message, they needed to decipher the identities of the other three tools.