From our 29th May edition

The internet is a great place to learn things you didn’t know you needed to learn. From the best way to peel a pomegranate (which I have shared with you in a previous column) to tutorials for single dads on how to plait their daughter’s hair.

You can find out all sorts of useful and useless facts on the internet and find yourself either shaking your head in disbelief or being blown away in amazement.

There is on the go right now, a video clip of less than three minutes that shows how clever cows are. Yep, you read that right. Cows and clever in the same sentence!

The clip starts with one particular cow in an enclosure with two dropbolts on the gate. Using her tongue, she flips the first bolt up and across and then the second and voila! The gate opens and she’s out!

Another cow is seen playing football. Another has been trained to do tricks on command, such as kneel, bow and spin around.

There is even a couple of very smart cows who have figured out how to work a water pump and who are filmed knocking the handle up so that the water flows and they can get a drink.

For me, though, the best is a calculating cow who, when all the cows are in their line with their heads locked through feeders, incredibly sees where the basket of feed has been left further along the line and releases the catch on her own feeder to get her head out, then she undoes the next cow’s catch and the next and the next and because these cows automatically back out when their heads are released, our brainbox bovine finds herself next to the basket and able to help herself.

I have to confess I have never really thought of how smart or otherwise cows might be. I think I might have assumed, through ignorance, that they don’t normally have much between the ears.

This wee video tells me otherwise.

Sometimes the internet can give too much information. Sometimes the information it gives can upset and unsettle as it opens up aspects of human nature that are far from edifying.

But it can also broaden our minds and our understanding and even change our views, not only of cows, but of people and places and the world and the wider universe and of more profound things too as it opens doors we perhaps never knew existed.

Like a lot of things in life, it is not the internet itself that is harmful but the way we, as human beings, use it. As parents we are able to put controls on the computer to safeguard what our children access to reduce the chances of their seeing what might harm or upset them.

As adults we need to exercise self-discipline in our internet use to safeguard ourselves.

And perhaps the most important thing we need to do is to remember that nothing beats face to face interaction with other people. We meet all sorts on the internet. But those all sorts are all around us too. There are people next door, one croft away, in the next village or town who are every bit as able to challenge and inspire us as anyone we might come across online.

Let’s not stop speaking with one another in the real world, in real time. Make this "Speak to Everyone’ week and see what you learn!

Susan Brown

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