Claim: Video clip shows an elephant painting a picture of an elephant.
Example:[Collected via e-mail, March 2008]
This shows an elephant painting an elephant. It's a little unbelievable. Is it true?
Origins: The above-linked video 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:
Pictures which were painted by elephants have gone on display at an Edinburgh gallery.
Art graduate Victoria Khunapramot, 26, has brought the paintings from Thailand to the Dundas Gallery on Dundas Street.
They include "self-portraits" by Paya, who is said to be the only elephant to have mastered his own likeness.
Paya is one of six elephants whose keepers have taught them how to hold a paintbrush in their trunks. They drop the brush when they want a new colour.
Mrs Khunapramot, from Newington, said: "Many people cannot believe that an elephant is capable of producing any kind of artwork, never mind a self-portrait.
"But they are very intelligent animals and create the entire paintings with great gusto and concentration within just five or 10 minutes — the only thing they cannot do on their own is pick up a paintbrush, so it gets handed to them.
"They are trained by artists who fine-tune their skills, and they paint in front of an audience in their conservation village, leaving no one in any doubt that they are authentic elephant creations."
Mrs Khunapramot, who set up the Thai Fine Art company after studying the history of art in St Andrews and business management at Edinburgh's Napier University, said it took about a month to train the animals to paint.
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:
So are these endearing mammals truly artistic? The answer, as politicians are fond of saying, is yes and no.
Let me describe exactly what happens. A painting session begins with three heavy easels being wheeled into position. On each easel a large piece of white card (30in x 20in) has been fixed underneath a strong wooden frame.
Each elephant is positioned in front of her easel and is given a brush loaded with paint by her mahout. He pushes the brush gently into the end of her trunk.
The man then stands to one side of his animal's neck and watches intently as the brush starts to make lines on the card. Then the empty brush is replaced by another loaded one, and the painting continues until the picture is complete.
The elephant then turns towards its audience, bows deeply and is rewarded with ba