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I saw that on ( --think-- it was Animal Planet) quite some time back. My jaw dropped. All my life, I thought I was a good artist. This elephant Picasso sucked the wind out of my sails. I resent that animals are deemed second class Beings, when the truth is, they are just different Beings. I learned from my cats, how incredibly psychically sensitive and aware cats are. All animals really. I would see, in forum chatrooms, not necessarily this one though, people make -mean- snarkings about the dead birds of recent. My heart breaks for those birds. There are probably babies waiting for the parents to come home to the nest who never will, leaving the chicks to die, as well. I hate mean spiritedness and I especially hate it against animals. Anyone who thinks mean is funny, is spiritualy corrupted to the core. Sorry, my digression, just had to vent that.
 
Sorry everyone, let's not get too excited.
Believe it or not, It's the Elephant handler doing the painting. He steers the Elephants trunk by manipulating the Elephants ear in the same way they control working Elephants in Thai logging, but much downscaled. It's a very well trained Pachiderm.
 
Yeah, it bothers me that, when the painting is being filmed, all you can see is the very end of the elephant trunk. Like someone is trying to obfuscate like a magician. Otherwise--------I stand by my sentiments about animals in general. My cats are **something else**.
 
As Pixel said this has been posted a long time ago and there was some discussion about it.

It kinda boils down to the question of whether the elephant is purposely and imaginatively painting this on his own free volition, or if the elephant is a trained animal, ..... or a combination of both. I maintained that the elephant could just be trained to do this kind of thing as I just saw one do it at my local zoo. And the paintings fetch a pretty good dollar too. I don't discount that self awareness might arise (or have already risen) in some animal species, but I don't know about this in particular.

It's tough to say just based on this alone. It's cool and all but humans have been able to get other animals to do all kinds of really neat things.
 
Thunderbird4 said:
Sorry everyone, let's not get too excited.
Believe it or not, It's the Elephant handler doing the painting. He steers the Elephants trunk by manipulating the Elephants ear in the same way they control working Elephants in Thai logging, but much downscaled. It's a very well trained Pachiderm.
Click to expand...

LOL! And here I thought E.T. came down and invested intelligence in yet another lowly mammalian. Thanks for debunking this one for us.
 
I'm not sure the ear pulling covers the complexity of what's going on here. It certainly makes us humans relax a bit, however.
 
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