Animals Who Paint Better Than You Do

Brittany wields her paintbrush with confidence, slapping it roughly against the canvas to produce streaks of green or smears of orange. With apparent pride, she steps back, inspects her work -- and extends her trunk to receive a freshly loaded paintbrush.

Brittany, an African elephant, is doing her small part to pay her way at the Milwaukee County Zoo. Her artwork is sold at the zoo's gift shop to raise funds.

This painting pachyderm is far from the only artistic animal in captivity. For years zoos and aquariums across the country have encouraged animals to paint as a way to keep the penned-up denizens mentally enriched. Typically, the paintings were discarded or set aside.

Keep reading.

-or-

Check out this video of an elephant painting an elephant, which was all over the web last week.

Comments

[caeious]

11:15 AM on 04/10/2008

Incredible. I have never seen documentation like this. I had a assumed an elephant would paint something closer to a painting I recently just completed called "Avalqi".

This is better than what many people could do. However I feel this elephant was trained to paint this picture and did not come up with it spontaneously. I hope someone can prove me wrong on that though.

http://www.caeious.com/

[MTGradwell]

12:28 PM on 04/09/2008

It's great that people see that video, because it makes them think about the possibility of animals being creative (which I believe they can be). Unfortunately it doesn't establish the case conclusively. The keeper hands over brushes loaded with black paint, until it's time to draw the flower. Then he provides red and then green. It's obviously been practiced before, probably many times over. I'd like to see a session where the elephant is totally in control; with e.g. a set of colour-coded airbrushes designed to be easily picked up and manipulated using just a trunk. Or a giant pressure-sensitive computer screen coupled to an extremely simple and intuitive paint program, so that the elephant can draw simply by moving the tip of its trunk across the screen. Could an elephant thus empowered draw objects placed before it? Would it spontaneously, without prompting, draw from memory recognisable representations of objects that it hasn't drawn before? Has anyone ever tried such an experiment?

[MNUSA]

11:43 AM on 04/09/2008

Paint better than me? That's not hard to do.