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.
The cartoon was intended to be an exercise in silliness.
Larson took the unusual step of issuing a press release, explaining the joke and apologizing for the confusion caused: 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. 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. 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. 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. One object resembles a crude hand saw, while the others are more abstract.
The single panel cartoon depicts a cow standing on its hind legs at a table, on which four oddly-shaped objects are placed.
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