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  • 2006-03-30 (xsd:date)
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  • Does a Video Show an Elephant Painting a Picture of an Elephant? (en)
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  • YouTube: Elephant Painting, version posted in mid-2010s: The video seen above is true in the basic sense that it captures the real phenomenon of elephants who perform the physical process of creating drawings by holding brushes in their trunks and applying them to cards mounted on easels. A BBC News article described an exhibition of such paintings at an Edinburgh gallery in 1996: The web site of the Asian Elephant Art and Conservation Project explains the background behind elephants' being taught to paint, with the resulting artworks being sold and the monies so raised being used to fund elephant conservation projects. The site includes a video gallery that features several clips of pachyderm artists in action similar to the one linked above, as well as galleries displaying the individual elephants' works. (Based on the similarity of drawings, we'd guess that the elephant shown in the example video is Hong, a nine-year-old female living at the Maetaman Elephant Camp in Thailand.) However, although these animals may be creating artworks in a purely physical sense, critics contend that the elephants participating in this activity are not actually painting in any meaningful sense of the word: They aren't engaging in any form of creativity, much less abstractly making free-form portraits of whatever tickles their pachydermic fancies at the moment; rather, they're simply actors performing in tourist trap attractions in Thailand, where they do nothing more than outline and color specific drawings they've been painstakingly trained to replicate — and they manage that much only while receiving a good deal of prompting and guidance throughout the process from their mahout (trainers). As zoologist Desmond Morris wrote after he and scientist Richard Dawkins traveled to Thailand in 2008 to investigate the elephant painting phenomenon: The following video clip reveals something of how much an elephant is actually guided by its mahout during the painting process: Other critics, such as One Green Planet's Kate Good, contend that not only is the elephant painting phenomenon a misleading show put on to garner money from tourists, but that the animals who participate in it have been abused; therefore, visitors to Thailand should shun the purchase of such works and avoid sharing videos in which the abuse can be seen. (en)
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