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This is pretty amazing what this elephant can do. Not only does it prove that this elephant understands and is proficient in the use of tools, but more importantly, it shows that she can understand abstract concepts. She grasps that a two-dimensional image can represent an elephant.

it makes me wonder just how much more goes on in their minds than we give them credit for.
I would love to spend some time studying these painting elephants. It seems like they have the potential to use a written pictographical language.


http://www.noob.us/entertainment/an-ele ... elephants/

I gotta look at that a couple of more times, but I tend to agree.

Well, Elephants are pretty smart. They are one of the few animals(dolphins being the other that comes to mind) that when shown a mirror realize it's thier reflection and not another animal. If it can do a painting of another elephant, in effect trying to do on paper what it sees that's rather impressive. Usually you get bright splashes of colour and a mess.

Are there any other elephants that are actually painting things, or are the rest of them just painting abstract shapes and lines? If this elephant is the only one that is representing 3d objects in 2d art...well, maybe she's just a genius elephant.

Wow...thats quite incredible. Here I was thinking I was gonna click the link and have to try and find an elephant shape in an abstract mess. Boy was I blown away. Thats incredible! Better then some humans can do!

I don't know, sometimes in circus, they train elephants to do things they wouldn't do with hits and stuff, I hope this is not the case.

Now, see, when it's abstract, I don't trust it. There's no proof that they just aren't rubbing brushes on the canvas as a form of mimicry or because they like the colors. This example is obviously something intentional, so that's pretty cool.

Not so abstract! The image shows at least one elephant actually drawing a recognizable picture...which is incredible.

There is only one flaw with Pariah's idea of an elephant picture language...since they never forget, why write it down? (joking)

I know: so dumb human mahouts can get them what they ordered.