Elephant

[nekosensei]

Wow...this elephant can draw better than I can. Now...my question is this. Is this an original composition or was the elephant trained to draw this same image repetitively? I could see this being the former since elephants are very intelligent creatures. For starters, they can recognize their image in a mirror, and the only other animals that can do that are dolphins and humans. They also understand what the concept of death is. When they come across the bones of an deceased elephant that they knew, they will pick up the bones and grieve. On the other hand, I could also see a trainer teaching the elephant to draw this (and other) images over and over again until it was able to perform it in front of an audience like a circus trick.

So...any thoughts on this video?

Comments

[kiwikat.livejournal.com]

wow, that's crazy.

[quietdarkness.livejournal.com]

I would have been interested in seeing what the other elephants were painting. There were more elephants there with canvas and paints.

Whereas some of it is bound to be training, some of it has to be innate talent, too. I can't imagine that every elephant can be trained to paint. It would be interesting to see if each had different subject matters, but the video doesn't show that.

Just like some people have more artistic talent than others, I must assume that elephants do too.

They are intelligent creatures, and can be trained. However, they don't appear to be abused or mistreated, because if they were, I doubt they'd be happily painting for a crowd in the open. So I must assume that they like this painting gig.

[linmayu.livejournal.com]

To me, it looked like the elephant was taught to draw the image. Reason being, the way it was drawn seems to have come from a human way of representing images. Not that I know what an elephant way of representing images would look like...