A Painting Elephant?

Posted by Mia Carter Jul 7, 2008

One of my fellow Suite101-ers mentioned a video of an elephant painting a picture of an elephant, so I just had to see it for myself. So I went where all people go nowadays when they're seeking a video online - YouTube. And this is what I found.

Pretty incredible, right?

Now it took me a minute to get over the terrible human-centric nature of it all: an elephant, likely plucked from its captive mother and trained to paint on an Asian beach somewhere, instead of roaming in the wild, or at least roaming in a wildlife preserve somewhere. It's a terrible example of animal exploitation of an animal for profit. But it's nonetheless incredible that this creature has the ability to paint. And he's not just painting random strokes and splotches - this creature has more talent than the average ten-year-old!

And I wonder if maybe the elephant was trained to create this particular painting - an elephant holding a flower. That's probably the case, but upon considering it a bit further, I realized that even if he was trained, the ability to retain that training is rather incredible in its own rite! You know, the more I see, the more I become optimistic that in 20 or 30 years, science will have developed to the point where we can definitively prove that animal intelligence is comparable to our own. Maybe then people will think twice before exploiting, harming, neglecting or abusing an animal, and hopefully the justice system will catch up when it comes to animal abuse legislation...We'll see.