That's a fair point. On the other hand, Veronika is described as a pet, which might mean she's not even being milked, and her lifestyle is perhaps more conductive to letting her experiment and learn about her environment than usual.
Still, we haven't been treated cows that horribly until relatively recently (not to say that older practices were particularly humane either), and there's probably a solid number of cows living outside of that system, so I'd still expect something like tool usage being noticed sooner than 2026. Which is of course a subjective impression, there may be other, better explanations...