Can elephants really paint?

I found a link somewhere to a YouTube video of a young Asian elephant painting quite a good outline picture showing an elephant holding a flower in its trunk. It is impressive to see, but I found it hard to believe the implication: that this elephant was creating, rather than performing a learned task. As a former zookeeper and continuing student of animal intelligence I’m well aware of how various animal species can display amazing “intelligence” and problem-solving skills. And I’m equally aware of how we can misinterpret the actions of animals: we are blind to demonstrations of the real “intelligence” that animals use in their lives, but seize upon actions that remind us of ourselves.

We must keep in mind that we are the ones defining “intelligence”: it’s very specific to human concerns, sometimes even cultural distinctions and values. We don’t even count as intelligence the mental activity displayed, say, by a social hunter like a wolf or lioness who uses its knowledge of prey behavior, local topography, and the expected reactions of its hunting partners, to set up successful hunts of prey which may be much larger, faster, and part of a distracting herd. What we like to see, what we (naturally) respond to, are actions that mimic our own activities. To impress us, the mimicry must even be culturally appropriate. If I try to teach my dog to sing and he makes sounds like a Tuvan throat-singer I probably won’t think the venture a success, but if he sounds like Caruso or Elvis, that’s a different matter.

Also, animals can appear to perform complicated volitional acts which may be done simply by rote or mimicry. You may teach a dog to perform an operatic aria, or to mimic you when you dance, but the meaning invested in the act, and the amount of creativity or self-expression involved may not be at all what you (would like to) believe it is. A few animals have become famous for applying their acute powers of observation of human gesture, stance and expression; their masters guided them without being at all aware of having done so. Clever Hans, the horse who solved arithmetic problems and tapped out the answers with his hoof, is the pre-eminent example; when his guileless owner was blocked off from view of the horse, or did not know the answer himself, then Hans could hear the questions but was completely unable to tap out any correct responses. It appears that the horse read his owner’s body language, not that the man intentionally cued him. If the owner knew that 9 hoof-taps was the answer to “What is 3 times 3?” then his body relaxed after the ninth tap and the horse reacted to that.

So when we think we see an animal performing a complex activity (such as painting representational pictures), and one which has no apparent functional place in its normal life, we need to set aside our amazement and delight and look deeper.

It appears that the elephant video was made in an elephant camp in Thailand, perhaps at ChengMai where elephants have been trained in drawing and painting for over a decade, or at a newer camp called Mateman Elephant Camp. At Chengmai, the paintings are sold or exchanged for donations which help support the elephant center. The use of elephants in Asian logging is declining, and of course truly wild habitat where elephants won’t come into conflict with humans is scarce or nonexistent there. So the financial return from tourists is probably a positive thing, and painting may provide some stimulating activity for the elephants themselves although their greatest natural need is for more active pursuits such as walking many miles daily, uprooting bushes and trees, searching for water, learning and remembering their territory, and so on.

The photo below, from a 1995 issue of the Chengmai Mail, shows elephants in front of their largest painting to that time, a 12m mural made to raise money for a children’s fund.

But what is the elephant in the video actually doing? How much direction might the elephant be getting from his keeper or mahout? The video’s close focus on the animal did not offer any view of the mahout, who might have been giving verbal cues or making gestures.

Is the elephant painting a picture which it has composed and chosen or one which it is copying or has learned? A clue to this does appear in the video: near the end after the elephant has painted the red flower, the camera draws back and we can see an attendant removing a finished painting of very similar flowers from an easel near the elephant. To me, this indicates the likelihood of rote performance. The trainer has schooled the elephant: he hands the elephant a brush with red paint on it and says “Flower now,” while someone holds up a board with flower paintings on it, and the elephant responds. Even that act shows “intelligence,” and certainly trainability, but it would not demonstrate that the elephant is making the multiple choices, conscious and subconscious, made by a human artist.

There weren’t any videos I could find of elephants just learning to paint at ChengMai, but those in US zoos who’ve been given paintbrushes have consistently turned out paintings that can definitely be called “non-representational.”

The fullest account I found of the training of the elephants to paint was at the blog Stranger in a Strange Land in the March 14, 2008 post. It indicates pretty intensive training of the elephants.

“Teaching an elephant to paint is like teaching a young child,” says Tossapol Petcharattanakool, an art instructor at Maesa and professionally trained as an elementary school art teacher. “They have a sense of form and style and can learn positioning of lines. But while the elephant IS the painter, there is definitely communication, collaboration between mahout and elephant.”

In addition, at a site that sells the elephants’ paintings, I found indications that individual elephants repeat the same work.

There’s a photo of an “elephant with flowers” painting very much like the one made on the video, but with two flowers instead of one, and underneath,

Product Information

This is the last “Self Portrait” in stock – our allotment for May/June from Elephant Artist Hong.

Thanks to Anchalee Kalmapijit, director of the Mateman Elephant Camp and now director of an new Elephant Art enclave, we were able to obtain several of these Elephant Self Portraits made famous first by the documentary made by Blink TV with Vanda Harvey – an English Artist which was featured on the BBC and then the video posted on YouTube.

According to Anchalee, now is the rainy season in northern Thailand which makes it difficult for the Elephant Artists to paint in the open. Couple that with the decision by Anchalee and Hong’s handler Noi to “relax” and paint at a pace more set by Hong’s “mood”, and one can understand the scarcity of these paintings in the elephant art market. These paintings have sold as fast as we post them so order NOW! There is NO video with this painting.

PS Check out other sites that carry self portraits by Hong – they sell for a lot more than this!

That gives me enough evidence to conclude, until I learn differently, that the elephants are “merely” reproducing movements they have been taught. The degree of consistency is so great (in these few examples I’ve seen) that the trainers may even guide the animal’s trunk in the beginning, to teach it the desired lines and curves. Later the trainer gives verbal commands indicating which set of lines to draw. The elephants are not, say, looking over at another elephant and drawing lines with a brush to depict what they see.

The more we learn about natural animal behavior the richer and more complex we see that it is. If elephants or chimpanzees are unable to paint original representational pictures, that does not diminish them. The delight we feel when animals act like people is deeply selfish: “Look, it can hold a bat and hit a ball with it!” It’s imitating a human, that pinnacle of creation! Homage to humanity from the lesser beings.

Much more interesting are the things they can do that arise from their “essence,” their way of interacting with the world. But few of us ever get to observe at length any animals that are not living in a human-designed world; our pets, our livestock, our zoo animals, all act within the limits of a man-made environment. Even in that environment we can get glimpses of essence, of dog-ness or penguin-ness, if we pay attention and are resistant to self-serving interpretations.

A local dryad

When I first saw this I understood better where the ancient Greeks got their vision of women turned into trees! Standing alone it is perhaps merely a curiosity, especially with the recently added white fencing, bark dust, and ornamentals (I’m sorry I never photographed it before those distractions/desecrations). But encountered suddenly in the forest, perhaps in dim light–that would be something quite different.

Keeping deer out of the garden

Deer love tender new leaves and can leap tall fences at a bound. We see them all the time, on our rural property outside the fenced area where the dogs have free range. But we’ve never had one get into our vegetable garden which is bordered on the back by that main fence, and on the other three sides by fences to keep our dogs out. The fences are well under five feet tall, nothing for a deer to jump. Our garden is in raised beds about three feet wide and varying in length; between the wooden sides of the beds, the walkways are about two and a half feet wide. My theory is, that deer (like other hoofed animals) are concerned about having good footing when they jump into a place, and the narrow spaces and mixture of heights doesn’t look safe or inviting.

Outside our fence I have been trying for over eight years to get trees and tall plants established in a bare spot to make a visual barrier between us and our neighbor’s two-story place. Poor soil and hot dry weather have been the major problem, but then the deer have chowed down on most everything that I have kept alive except some weeping willows I started by sticking branches in the ground. I’ve tried old remedies, new remedies, and wacky ideas: Mylar pinwheels, hanging scented soap, rotten egg spray, flapping hanging things tied to the trees, systemic bittering agents put in the soil, glittery hanging things like metallic beads, Mylar streamers, and aluminum pie plates (reputed to work to repel birds eating ripening fruit). Never did try hanging little bags of human hair trimmings, a method with a following. I bought dehydrated coyote urine but then on the drive home thought about how it must have been collected, and went back and returned it with an explanation to the wild bird store, and I believe they stopped carrying it. It might have worked, but the confinement needed to produce it was unacceptable.

I went so far as to lay down landscape cloth around the trees and then on top of that peg down that plastic-netting fencing used for temporary barriers. I put it down horizontally: it did a good job of tripping me up all the time but the deer did not seem to be affected. And soon falling leaves covered it, weeds rooted in the decomposed leaves, and it was buried.

Finally I decided to mimic what worked in the garden and I used wide plastic tape, like crime scene tape or the fiberglass tape used on drywall seams, to divide the tree area into many narrow portions. It worked! I put it at varying heights between 2 – 4 feet, going around a tree trunk or stake and then off at an angle to another point. I’ve now moved to using bright yellow polypropylene rope because the tapes didn’t hold up to uv exposure, and the stronger rope is easier for me to get over or under when working out there. Once the trees get tall enough, it can be removed; without some protection, nothing but the original willows will ever get that tall. It’s not too scenic, but I don’t care, and the neighbors–I think they probably prefer it to the flapping plastic trash bags!

Recently overheard…

at our neighborhood restaurant: a woman in her 30’s, addressing the man she was with: “Now Bush, he’s a Republican, right? and that other one, Clinton, was a Democrat?”

The man’s rejoinder, I could not hear, more’s the pity.

H.L. Mencken, an idol of my youth, is said to have written (though I can’t find a source for it) “No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

In this case the woman may be of normal intelligence, but raised by coyotes out in the Great American Desert.

A tough day for horses

Yesterday was a beautiful late-spring day (our usual hot weather has been happily delayed) and we went to a draft horse pulling contest, and then to visit my father where we watched the Belmont Stakes broadcast.

I don’t follow horse racing, but I had seen something about recent controversy in the sport including concern over the favorite in the Belmont Stakes, Big Brown, being run with a hoof-crack. Had he won as expected he would have been the first Triple Crown winner since 1978. Unfortunately something was amiss with Big Brown, and his jockey pulled him up well before the end so that he finished last. Maybe it was the hoof-crack, maybe something else; his trainer and the vets passed him as fit, and my layman’s opinion that he was favoring one leg going from the barn to the track may have been my imagination. Perhaps more details will be released.

I also took offense at the commercial linkage of the horse “Big Brown” to UPS: the mounted track employee who accompanied this horse and his jockey on the pre-race parade had “UPS” prominently on his windbreaker and I had a brief glimpse of a banner above the starting gates reading “What can Brown do for you?” Will the Sport of Kings follow so many other public events in this regard, so that we can look forward to Pepsi’s Belmont Stakes or Jim Beam’s Kentucky Derby? Then jockeys can wear big corporate logos on their silks, and the horses can even be re-named for the main sponsor product. “And in the stretch it’s Burger King leading, Windows Vista and GoDaddy.com moving up, and Scott’s TurfKing Fertilizer in fourth…” Well, maybe the dramatic failure of the Big Brown/UPS advertising opportunity will delay this.

At the draft horse pull

The draft horse pull promised to be a much different event. It was held at a local historic farm as part of a Saturday festival with old tractor displays, a pony ride, goats for toddlers to feed grass to, wagon rides, and demonstrations of crafts like lace-making and woodcarving. The pony ride wasn’t the commercial event with dispirited horses plodding around day after day, but one steady horse being led around by a remarkably attentive teenage kid who was very gentle and responsible. The riders ranged from the nine-year old with pink cowboy boots to youngsters not even walking yet, who waved their arms and babbled happily as moms walked alongside.

In a draft horse pull, the horses–teams of two in this case–are hitched to a weighted “sled” which they pull for 27.5 feet down a 20 foot wide track. The weight is increased until finally only one team can pull it.

This pull started with a 1000 pound sled, adding 1000 pounds after each round. In the first couple of rounds the horses were calm, just walking away with the weight. As they got warmed up and the weights increased, most of the teams became eager and excited, pulling hard as they approached the sled.

Hitching the teams to the sled became a tricky business. The horses were ready to surge forward all on their own, unexpectedly. The pulling parts of the harness are attached to a crossbar (whiffletree, I think it is called) on the ground behind the horses. It’s visible in the picture below of a team not hitched to the sled.

The driver controls the team while another person gets between them and the sled to fasten the sled’s cable to the whiffletree.

This is one of those jobs like being a choker-setter in logging, requiring timing, alertness, experience and some luck to get it done right without getting caught in the explosive movement of powerful forces. Sometimes it takes a third person in front of the horses to restrain them from starting forward; occasionally the person in the danger spot has to jump back and then try again. The audience was urged to keep still to avoid any sounds the horses might interpret as a signal to start.

By the time the weight of the sled is up to 5000 pounds, equalling the average weight of one of these two-horse teams, it’s getting difficult to drag and the horses really throw themselves into it with all their amazing muscle power.

But in too many of the teams we saw, the two horses weren’t pulling equally: one was doing most of the work, sometimes really seeming to struggle, while the other was shirking. As someone in the crowd remarked, “That’s what they mean by “not pulling your weight!”” Some of the hard workers were rearing up slightly and actually throwing their body weight forward against the harness, hindquarters making a powerful effort, while their team-mates just leaned into it a bit.

I don’t have any expertise in this and so I looked for factors I might not be considering. The distance being pulled is very short as compared to real pulling jobs in logging or farm work, giving the driver little time to give commands, and also perhaps the horses are accustomed to taking a little more distance to get evened out. On the other hand, these draft horse owners travel widely to competitions just like the one we saw, so it should be a major part of training to have both horses pulling evenly right away. The horses know very well the nature of the event, and the lazy ones have apparently figured out that such a short pull won’t last long enough for them to be called on their lack of effort. In fact I only heard one driver giving any verbal commands, and this was at 6 or 7000 pounds. His team had trouble getting started and he urged them on individually by name. They worked together and moved the sled.

We were both disturbed enough to leave, my husband first and me a few minutes later during the 7000 pound pulling. By the sound of things the event continued for another few rounds–another half-ton added each round–and for us, at least, it could only have become more difficult to watch. I am contacting some draft horse people to find out more about this; if I’ve misinterpreted what I saw, I’ll correct this post.

And no, I’m not a PETA member or an “animal rights” fanatic. In fact I don’t believe animals have rights in the sense that people have rights. I believe we human beings have strong moral obligations to avoid causing suffering to other humans and to animals and that these obligations must be backed up by well-enforced laws. Some animals like horses and dogs have been bred to be working partners and companions of humans, and we train them to do certain things, but there is no need for cruelty or the imposition of suffering in the work or the training. I’m not a vegetarian, but I believe we have an obligation to treat all animals in human care with compassion and expertise. Two examples of the “expertise” part: –Temple Grandin’s work to design slaughterhouses in accordance with the behavior and perceptions of livestock animals so as (for instance) to avoid having to force them through frightening passages or over walkways with poor traction where they fall. –A horse-owning neighbor’s account of the actual impact of recent “humane” legislation to ban horse slaughterhouses in the US: old and unwanted horses being simply abandoned on public or unfenced land, and the transportation of horses, in packed trucks, to slaughterhouses not in their own state…but across several states to Mexico, where there are no real humane standards enforced.

Defensive chainsawing

Here in wildfire country, it’s all about “defensible space” around your house, created by “fuel reduction.” We’re in the foothills of southern Oregon’s Siskiyou Mountains at about 2300 ft.; it’s dry, and rocky, and wildfires are a fact of life.

Shortly after we moved here I overheard someone say, at the local grocery store, “Plans for summer trips? No, we never go anywhere in the summer in case of wildfire.” This sounded pretty paranoid but I understand it better now that we’ve been here 12 years and seen two fires come close enough to worry about.

Pine-oak woodlands and mixed conifer stands seem to be the climax trees in our area, but 150 years of logging, farming, and road-building have caused a lot of disturbance. On our property, oaks, Douglas fir, and sun-loving Pacific madrones are the most common native trees. The madrones, which would be shaded out by dense mature forest, are often multi-trunked especially when resprouting after being cut; some of the oaks are the same. This results in brushy growths that can feed fire close to the ground. Shrubs like manzanita (Arctostaphylos sp.) and buckbrush (Ceanothus cuneatus) are very common and both are superb fuel for fires. We cleared one area ourselves, early on, of many pickup loads of buckbrush ranging to 5 feet tall. We burned them soon after cutting and even green they burned like gasoline.

Since that early effort of ours, the agencies concerned with fires and forests have gotten much more aggressive about fuel reduction on private as well as public lands. Small acreage homeowners like ourselves present a real problem to those fighting wildfires, since we expect our property, lives, and livestock to be protected and the fire-fighting resources–people, planes, equipment–are always stretched thin. Because we are part of the problem, we have been encouraged to be part of the solution as well by creating defensible zones around structures and along driveways, and having acreage “treated” to reduce fuel loads. In practice this means removing brush and dead trees, increasing distance between trees, and “limbing them up” by cutting branches that start below 6-10 feet.

The local fire district has a program to reimburse landowners for the costs of fuel reduction and we have participated in this twice. Someone comes out from the fire district to do a walk-around with you, discussing how fires travel and what changes you need to make, then you can either hire the work done or do it yourself, and upon a second inspection, be reimbursed on a per-acre basis for satisfactory completion. The amount is about $300/acre.

The financial aid means that it is possible for property owners to do fuel reduction even if they can’t do this strenuous job themselves. And when wildfires threaten private property, certified defensible properties will be given priority if there aren’t enough resources to protect everything.

Our first project was along the driveway and around the house. It included work we did ourselves (such as screening the open space between our large deck and the ground to prevent wind-blown sparks from igniting the dry wood from underneath) and work we paid for (the chain-saw removal of trees and brush and later burning of the brush piles).

This spring we heard the grants were available again and decided to have fuel reduction done on most of the rest of our 5 acres. This was a decision that we made with regret; the cleaned-up look, which some call a “parklike setting” of spaced-out trees with little growing between them, is not pleasing to our eye, provides less cover and food for wildlife, and will change the mix of wildflowers we enjoy. Twelve years of benign neglect has allowed the land to recover from various affronts and we’ve seen a significant increase in our favorite wildflower, the ephemeral Erythronium hendersonii (Henderson’s Fawn Lily, but we call it Trout Lily–both terms refer to the mottled leaves), and others.

However, thinking of our house becoming a pile of cinders was incentive enough. It is also true that big wildfires fed by abnormal accumulations of fuel are a long-term loss to wildlife here, where dry weather and poor soils make plant recovery slow; and both times we have chosen the more expensive method of selective hand-thinning by chainsaw over the cheaper way of clearing acres with whirling blades mounted on eco-buster caterpillar tractors. That method, as we saw when BLM used it next to (and actually on) our land, leaves a blasted wasteland that reminded me of photos of WWI France where months of artillery shelling turned forests into craters studded with splintered trunks rising at angles from the trampled mud.

The latest clearing work has been completed, although warm weather arrived too soon for the piles to be burned; they’ll have to wait until the rains start in the fall. I didn’t think to take any “before” pictures, but for comparison the photo below is of an area untreated since we cut buckbrush a decade ago. It’s less dense than the treated areas were, before clearing, and has little madrone, but the growth of manzanita and oak clumps is similar.

The next photo is of a just-cleared section; the whitish band near the center is the driveway which would not have been visible at all before the thinning and limbing-up. The indistinct brown blob just to the left of the driveway (but closer) is a pile of branches and brush to be burned. A few piles will be left for the small creatures to shelter in, and a few large dead trees were left standing. The man who did the work is well experienced and at our request left a little extra brush where he thought the fire district would approve it.