The Elephant World’s Andy Warhol

The last couple of days the streaming video world has been atwitter about a film of an elephant in a square in Thailand apparently painting its self-portrait. I watched it yesterday, and besides being fascinating, it seemed authentic. But is it really an elephant making art?

The first place I go when I’m intrigued by something on the web is Snopes, a site that for years run by Barbara and David Mikkelson, who pursue the origins and truth of urban legends on the Web – which has become the best place to find both information AND disinformation. On the Net, urban legends and hoaxes have gotten a second lease on life

Every legend we humans have ever created is somewhere out there on the Internet. Hoary tales like the Loch Ness Monster share time with Photoshopped predator pictures, the now well-documented, mostly fictional “Darwin Awards” and rumors about presidential candidates.

Snopes’ research finds that the elephants are really painting. Many pachyderms work with trainers, who say it takes about a month to teach elephants, who can’t pick up paintbrushes, to commit paint to canvas. A study found that elephants can recognize themselves in the mirror, which indicates self-awareness, a trait formerly only known to exist in humans, apes and dolphins. They are extremely social beings, which is why the solitary elephant in the Anchorage Zoo was moved recently to an enclosure in California where it could be with other elephants. They have also shown aptitude with primitive tools, so painting probably isn’t much of a stretch. See more about this at the Asian Elephant Art and Conservation Project.

As the proud owner of an ape-stract painting by Cheeta, the chimpanzee who starred with Johnny Weismuller in the Tarzan films of the 1930s and 1940s (yes, he is 75 years old, the Methusaleh of apes) I can attest to the quality of art in the animal world. Animals can teach us a lot – if we just let them.