The elephants are simply tracing a pencil image, or one on a paper underneath.

It’s still amazing dexterity and ability, but it’s not an elephant creating an original work of art.

This is my Dad’s video, that’s him recording it and saying “Oh my gosh!”… it’s all legit.
A huge amount of the proceeds go directly back to the elephant camps to ensure their well being.
The elephants do this all on their own and there are no lines drawn or anything prior to them painting.
They are truly amazing!

mean comments make me CRY.

I agree with Lux – seriously, guys, crying? I’m embarrassed for you. I bet you call funny stories “gems” and hang cliches on your walls. The elephant was painting to get money from dumb tourists – the sort of people who stand around and squawk “OH MY GAAASH.” You know – you.

I love elephants but this video felt very wrong and made me sad…..and then I read all the comments and they made me sadder.

Monique’s assumptions about elephants in captivity reveals her ignorance and lack of research about elephants in captivity. Domesticating wild elephants involves torture (trapping them in pits, chaining them by all four legs to trees, beating them, and depriving them of food and water until their spirits are broken. Then the kindness begins…food, water, release from the chains. This is the tradition in India and Thailand. The elephant pictured in this video is a baby, probably not more than two-four years old. I don’t know where this particular facility is, but it may be one that tries to protect already captive elephants from further abuse and has the elephants paint to raise money. If you want to know how elephants are captured for the tourist market, logging, and other human uses (like zoos and circuses), visit http://www.elephants.com, http://www.pawsweb.org/ and the elephant nature park in Thailand. In addition, comparing an elephant to a dog or a cat is just more stupidity. Ugh. If only there were fewer dumbasses like Monique in the world and more people willing to actually research.

I know it’s probably too late to comment and nobody will read this, but what’s with everyone saying that elephants aren’t domestic animals? Haven’t they been domesticated for centuries? While my sister was living in India she would send us pictures of elephants in the local parades and dressed up for religious occasions. Maybe PETA would disapprove of pet elephants even when they’re well-treated, but PETA are crazy in my opinion! They even think dogs are better off dead than as pets, thus their recent “better dead than a slave” campaign where they actually adopted perfectly healthy animals from shelters just to euthanize them! Thus saving them from the horrors of having to live with a loving human family. Maybe when all humans live as well as pets we can start worrying about how well our pets live. I certainly never thought of kids learning to paint in preschool as being abused, and I don’t know why people are assuming that pain would be involved.

Fantastic! Thanks for posting this. I am really impressed with the precision, so cute. The only thing that bothers me about this video is that the piece of paper is too narrow. Get this elephartist a bigger sheet of paper so he can really express himself!

I can do that with my penis.

Also, I read most of the comments, I don’t know if anyone linked to this article on wikipedia about elephant intelligence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_intelligence