mercurial
MyBB Legend
Is it true that elephants are artists? Can they really paint pictures of flowers, trees and even other elephants? Are they the only animals on Earth, apart from human beings, that can create pictorial images?
Last summer my friend, the scientist Richard Dawkins, asked me to look at a video clip on the internet, taken in Thailand, that showed a young female elephant called Hong painting a picture of an elephant running along, holding a flower in its trunk. He wanted to know if I thought it was a fake.
The internet is notoriously awash with fakes of one kind or another, but this particular video appeared to be genuine. I could hardly believe my eyes as the elephant with a paintbrush inserted in the tip of its trunk started to place lines on a large white card.
Slowly, without anyone touching the animal's trunk, the image emerged. And it was an elegant image, too, something a human artist would not be ashamed of.
From time to time, the elephant's keeper, or mahout, took an empty brush and replaced it with a loaded one, but that was apparently the only form of human intervention.
I was amazed and puzzled by what I saw and decided that I really must find out more. Back in the Fifties I had myself made a serious study of the artistic abilities of chimpanzees, but they had never achieved anything like this.
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