Elephant painting!?

[Dukat]

This is a bit off-topic, but I was so amazed, I had to share it. Don't know whether this has been posted before. Especially as the video got 5 million views. But this elephant is probably better at painting than I am. Amazing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He7Ge7Sogrk

[Ts4EVER]

Question is: Does it know what it is doing or is it just repeating something it learned?

[Thorondor123]

Repeating something he learned I'd say. Cool nevertheless.

[Ts4EVER]

We should hike there and teach him to draw nude women.

[Tedacious]

yeah probably painting something it has learned (through whips and electric shocks?).

Still, if real (anyway really), the elephant in the picture is really cute

[Kubador]

The clip makes one wonder but still... I can understand why he'd paint an elephant but the flower? Clearly the flower part (if not all) was a human doing.

[Lightning]

It's an elephant. It doesn't know what it's painting...

[Kading]

It's an elephant. It doesn't know what it's painting...

Elephants are self aware, ya know. If a gorilla can learn sign language I'll wager a fair amount of money that an elephant can learn to express itself in some form of art.

[Wilhelm]

Taken directly from the comments for the video:

This video possibly indicating self-awareness is ambiguous. The quality of the painting is extremely high, leading many astonished viewers to doubt the video's authenticity. The website snopes.com, which specializes in debunking urban legends, lists the video as "true", in that the elephant produced the brush strokes, but notes that the similarity of the produced paintings is indicative of a learned sequence of strokes rather than a creative effort on the part of the elephant.
(wikipedia-cut)

[Gl@mRock]

It's an elephant. It doesn't know what it's painting...

Unless he's the Elephant Man...

[Graf_Radetzky(CZ)]

First when i read the title , I though you are talking about camouflage of Ferdinand/Elephant.

It is cool, although as it been mentioned, it had to be hard trained and repeated.

[Flyboy1942]

That definitely has the look of a repeatedly practiced painting. There was a stroke for each paint brush it was handed, which was especially noticeable when it started the flower with the red brush.

At first I was wondering if elephants can see florescent paint or something and it was just tracing a picture we cant see with our limited vision, but I realized it was much simpler when I saw the same picture, but slightly different in the related videos section.

Still pretty cool though. I certainly didn't know Elephants had that kind of fine motor control with their trunks.

[Fuchs]

This is learned. Because this is realistic painting how humans would do it.

There are certain elephants who paint their own style, it's colours splashed together with some lines in it but the elephant thinks it's cool.

[Lightning]

It's an elephant. It doesn't know what it's painting...

Elephants are self aware, ya know. If a gorilla can learn sign language I'll wager a fair amount of money that an elephant can learn to express itself in some form of art.

http://www.elephantart.com/catalog/default.php

Look at Hong's drawings. They are identical. An elephant is an animal. It doesn't think like we do. It has no conception of art and it does not know that what he is drawing is the same thing he is.

And there is a huge difference between a gorilla and an elephant and there is a huge difference between sign language and art.

[Admiral Donutz]

Yep, the video shows the elephant executing a trick it has been learned to do rather then "expressing itself" by having it freely mess around. I've withnessed some of this myself in Thailand, were they had two elephants paint something (not quite sure what it was supposed to be though :p ).   The "free style" painting is much more artistic. Not really natural either since you still have to make the elephant learn how to use paint.

But if the paintings are sold for a good purpose I don't really see the harm in it. Though I'd acknowledge that the living conditions of some of these elephants might be a bit poor (stressed elephants and such) which could use some improvement. But we see these conditions improving, and let's not forget that 50 years ago the animals overhere in zoos asuch were not really threatend in a natural, responsible way either.

Though I think some animal rights activist are taking things a bit too far, one can offer animals a respectful, caring enviroment were they can live without going nuts yet learn them a few tricks for various purposes such as entertainment or labour. To truely let animals live their own, natural, lives would mean we'd need to set them all free (yes, that includes pets too) and not keep any domasticated animals at all anymore. :p  That's not really an option either.