————   Why Elephants Paint (and How You Can Help)   ————

Posted by Jessica McHugh on May 15, 2008

Recently we've received a number of emails asking if Elephant Nature Foundation has elephants paint at the Park. The answer is a resounding no. We neither have elephants paint (or perform any other humanized activity), nor do we support this practice. Read more to find out why.

The world is more connected today than it ever has been in the past. Email, cell phones, and social networking websites link more people to new ideas, concepts, movements, and events every day. The internet is our passport. And Google Earth and YouTube are the answer for armchair travelers around the world.

And yet despite being more in-tune with what's going on not only in our own neighborhood but throughout the world, we can still forget that our connections impact one another. Clicking on a website link, downloading a video, purchasing a product online are all things that feel distant to us. But they can greatly affect someone else on the other side of the world whether we intend it to or not.

Several months ago, a video was uploaded to YouTube by a company specializing in "exotic world gifts." This video showed a young elephant painting a self-portrait. The reception to the video was enormous - within days it was posted to thousands of blogs, websites, and news outlets around the world. People debated whether or not it was real. People commented that it was a sign of intelligence. People asked where they could go to see an elephant paint in person. People declared that they would definitely want to buy an elephant painting for themselves.

What most people didn't realize is that the elephant painting was, in fact, real and elephants are, in fact, highly intelligent. But the reason an elephant can paint isn't because of intelligence alone. It's because an elephant has been forced to learn to paint, often by enduring brutal training methods.

What most people didn't realize is that by clamoring to buy an elephant painting, they were creating a larger market for such methods.

And what most people didn't realize is that by creating a larger market, two elephants - a Mama and a baby - who had been living a peaceful life at Elephant Nature Park for the past two years, were taken back by their owner and taken away from the Park, so that he could have the baby trained to paint. The training will be the first time the baby is ever separated from his Mother, the first time he will have pain inflected upon him, the first time he will learn to fear human beings, all in order to make him submit, all so that he learns how to hold that paintbrush, all so that he memorizes how to paint that painting.

Both inspiration and desperation can be born from our connections. Help us stop the desperation by encouraging your friends and family to understand when they share a link to a YouTube video showing an elephant painting, when they purchase something painted by an elephant, they are creating a market for that product.

Help us stop the desperation by instead sharing a link to an award-winning National Geographic documentary that demonstrates the type of training an elephant may endure in order to produce that painting. And in doing so, may the ripples you send out into the world be ones of inspiration and hope. And may more eles be saved from ever having to live a life that is not very ele-like at all.