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[Neil]

my daughter showed me this this afternoon.........just a wonderful little piece of nature at it's best........

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQv5mE42Yos

[BarryM]

Not quite so natural http://www.snopes.com/photos/animals/elephantpainting.asp

Barry M

[Neil]

However, although these animals may be creating artworks in a purely physical sense, critics contend that the elephants participating in this activity are not actually "painting" in any meaningful sense of the word: They aren't engaging in any form of creativity, much less abstractly making free-form portraits of whatever tickles their pachydermic fancies at the moment; rather, they're simply actors performing in tourist trap attractions in Thailand, where they do nothing more than outline and color specific drawings they've been painstakingly trained to replicate — and they manage that much only while receiving a good deal of prompting and guidance throughout the process from their mahout (trainers).


above taken from the linked prose!!


I knew there would be some scepticism and cynicism about this, and that is why I put the link up??.............but in the same vain as what these animals are being trained to do..........so we train our children from a very early age to replicate what we want to see for ourselves out of them.....simply called sensory motor co ordination training where the child learns through imitation to copy what they see.......and as such, those mahouts are doing nothing more different with their animals that we do with children of 2 -5 years, when old enough to hold a pencil/crayon.....and that is to train parrot fashion!!!!.......it is only in later development that the human's (in theory) intelligence takes over from being trained to thinking for oneself..........but on seeing the behaviour of many humans and what they transgress into.......I rather feel that the animal species of this world has the upper hand!!!!