Elephant paints realistic picture of an elephant.

I also recognize that in our anti-nature culture we are all indoctrinated with vestiges of the geocentric mindset, and an anthropocentric first response to an elephant painting is not an unanticipated response.

Elephant 'self-portrait' on show
(BBC News Online, 21 July 2006)

Art graduate Victoria Khunapramot, 26, has brought the paintings from Thailand to the Dundas Gallery on Dundas Street.

They include "self-portraits" by Paya, who is said to be the only elephant to have mastered his own likeness.

Paya is one of six elephants whose keepers have taught them how to hold a paintbrush in their trunks. They drop the brush when they want a new colour.

Mrs Khunapramot, from Newington, said: "Many people cannot believe that an elephant is capable of producing any kind of artwork, never mind a self-portrait.

"But they are very intelligent animals and create the entire paintings with great gusto and concentration within just five or 10 minutes - the only thing they cannot do on their own is pick up a paintbrush, so it gets handed to them.

"They are trained by artists who fine-tune their skills, and they paint in front of an audience in their conservation village, leaving no one in any doubt that they are authentic elephant creations."

Mrs Khunapramot, who set up the Thai Fine Art company after studying the history of art in St Andrews and business management at Edinburgh's Napier University, said it took about a month to train the animals to paint.

Elephant expert Dr Joyce Poole, who has studied the animals for 30 years, said she owned an elephant painting but had not come across animals painting their own images.

The Oslo-based scientist said: "I have seen elephants painting, but it was very free-flow.

"It's certainly capable of drawing an elephant, and could be trained, but might not really understand what it was doing."

The proboscis, or trunk, is a fusion of the nose and upper lip, elongated and specialized to become the elephant's most important and versatile appendage. African elephants are equipped with two fingerlike projections at the tip of their trunk, while Asians have only one. According to biologists, the elephant's trunk may have over forty thousand individual muscles in it,[25] making it sensitive enough to pick up a single blade of grass, yet strong enough to rip the branches off a tree. Some sources indicate that the correct number of muscles in an elephant's trunk is closer to one hundred thousand.[26]

I also think our culture is so traditionally anthropocentric that it threatens us to imagine that another animal besides ourselves could have the faculty to create an image threatens our identity.

Man used to be described as the "tool using animal," but now many animals are seen to be using tools including insecets, so we have had to come up with other definitions of our identity.

As I live and breathe it's Pablo Pachydern