Yesterday my friend Marc forwarded a link of an elephant painting a picture at a tourist camp in Thailand.  Perhaps you’ve seen it floating around YouTube?

Marc asked me what I thought and I told him, but instead of just sharing it with him, I figured more may want to know whether elephants really paint.  Below is my take on the issue:

From what I’ve heard from such elephant experts as Soraida Salwala (founder of the Friends of the Asian Elephant Hospital), Lek Chailert (founder of the Elephant Nature Park), Pat Derby (founder of Performing Animals Welfare Society) and Don Tayloe (director of “The Last Elephants in Thailand”), elephant paintings, such as the one pictured below, are a learned trick that elephants at tourist camps are forced to learn by their owners/handlers, similar to how elephants in circuses are trained/beaten (depending upon your take on their methods) until they learn how to walk on their hind legs, raise a human above their head, etc.  Some elephants take to painting more “naturally”, others are beaten or have a paint brush taped to their trunk in order to learn how to hold the paint brush “correctly”. Then, what you can’t see in the video is, the handler will then tap, push or guide the elephant’s trunk to create the “correct” picture.

While at the Thai Elephant Conservation Center in August 2009, I filmed the elephant painting act for my documentary, “The Eyes of Thailand“, and I have footage of the handler tapping on the elephant’s trunk out of the view of most of the audience of Thai school children.  Also, one elephant chose pink instead of green to paint the leaves on the tree and the handler actually hit the elephant because that was “wrong”.

With such strict training and protocol for what’s “right” and “wrong”, I have a hard time calling these elephant paintings “art”. However, I do believe that elephants are intelligent, emotional and creative beings that like to express themselves.  For this reason, some zoos in the U.S. (such as the Milwaukee Zoo referenced in a May 7, 2008 article in the L.A. Times) give elephants easels and paint brushes to paint abstractly on their own.  But, this is mainly as a distraction from boredom the elephants experience in captivity within the zoos and it only works occasionally.  Given their own agency, I do not think any elephant in the wild would choose to paint in nature–they would be too busy enjoying life as an elephant!

You can learn more about elephant painting by viewing the trailer for Don Tayloe’s “The Last Elephants in Thailand” here.

Check out past blogs about elephant painting here.

-Windy Borman

Director/Producer, The Eyes of Thailand

San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer, Robert Selna, recently visited the Elephant Nature Park in Thailand, where I filmed for 2 days in August (“Production Days 8-9: Elephant Nature Park“) and spent time with the founder, Lek Chailert.

Selna’s 5 Take-Aways from his visit are:

1Elephants recognize themselves as individuals in mirrors. The experiment was done recently at the Bronx Zoo on three elephants, who, upon seeing their own image in the mirror, responded with self-referential behaviors. One elephant, Maxine, used it to examine the inside of her mouth and back of her ear.

2One way elephants communicate is through infrasound – sound too low in frequency to be audible by humans. Infrasound can travel through the air, through water, through rock, through forest and through the earth. Elephant infrasonic communication can take place over a distance of up to 2.5 miles.

3Some elephants live in matriarchies. They have family units consisting of only adult females, young of both sexes, and a leader who is the oldest and most knowledgeable female.

4Elephants are emotional animals. They don’t weep, but they do pour fluids out of a gland located halfway between the eye and ear in times of great emotional excitement.

5Elephants are caring and empathetic animals. When a member of a social group falls – from illness, for instance – or becomes stuck in mud or water, others will move in and try to raise the debilitated animal to its feet and keep it moving. Sometimes adult females will care for – babysit – an infant or young elephant who has been orphaned or temporarily separated from its mother.

Young elephant at Elephant Nature Park.

On August 19 I journeyed north of Chiang Mai to the Elephant Nature Park, which was founded by Sangduen “Lek” Chailert in 1995.  The ENP is basically a sanctuary for elephants Lek and her staff rescue from logging camps, trekking camps, villagers that find an orphaned elephant but cannot care for them, and sometimes even from begging on the street.

Visitors and volunteers pay to take care of the elephants in the idyllic setting at the base of lush mountains, which can mean anything from preparing baskets of food for the 33 elephants that call ENP home to feeding them, bathing them, or cutting grass with machetes.

Before I sat down to interview her, I had a ground-level view of Lek interacting with her herd of elephants, which include 2 babies.  At one point, I was literally in the middle of the herd—elephants all around me—filming Lek scratch the backs and bellies of the baby elephants while their mothers had lunch nearby.  For a split second I thought, one sudden move and I’ll be trampled; but the footage was amazing!

During her interview, Lek explained that her vision is to educate the mahouts (elephant caretakers), tourists and her government to take better care of the country’s symbol, by providing an alternative to work camps and begging.  For more information, please visit http://www.elephantnaturepark.org/index.htm

-Windy Borman
Producer, Writer and Director, The Eyes of Thailand

P.S. You can support the documentary production by making a tax-deductible donation through the film’s fiscal sponsor, the San Francisco Film Society, by clicking here.  Thank you!

Today, I decided to put my extra day in Chiang Mai to good use.  First, I visited the Elephant Nature Park office near Thapae Gate.  The Founder and Director, Sangduen “Lek” Chailert, is well known in the international elephant conservation and animal rights world and has appeared in several TV shows and documentaries.  I wanted to round out my interviews for The Eyes of Thailand by interviewing her, so I visited the office.  I met Lek and she agreed to let me film at the ENP on August 19-20.

Filming at the Chiang Mai Zoo.

Because it’s foggy in Chiang Mai today, Julia and I decided to postpone our trip to Doi Suthep because we would not be able to see much of Chiang Mai there.  Instead, we went on an elephant hunt at the Chiang Mai Zoo.  A few notes on the Zoo: it’s very clean, has well-kept grounds, and if you were a fan of zoos, you might think it was nice.  Animals were kept in cement enclosures, not unlike the zoos in the US, and in the center of the park, there is a large “Presentation Stage” where handlers have animals do tricks for school kids.

Julia and I followed the signs to the Elephants, but instead found a large Elephant Sanctuary, so to speak, that was under construction.  Julia pointed out that the ground is grass and mud, which is much better for the elephants’ feet than the concrete used elsewhere, but this enclosure had an odd ramp that lead to none other than the… Presentation Stage.  That’s when we remembered that there was a drawing on a poster at the Presentation Stage that showed an elephant painting…

Still searching for the elephants at the zoo, we wandered toward the panda exhibit.  I am not exaggerating when I say, Chiang Mai is crazy about its pandas!  They successfully breed a panda cub recently and panda fever is everywhere (in and out of the zoo): signs, posters, advertisements, painted umbrellas, stuffed animals, a person dressed up in a Panda suit bowing and waving as people enter the exhibit.  It’s an amazing spectacle.

As I filmed this from a distance, Julia noticed an elephant behind a fence.  What we originally thought was an exhibit turned out to be a separate gated area where a group of 4 individuals (who did not appear to work for the zoo), were selling small baskets of fruit to tourists for them to feed the elephant.  The irony of a working elephant at a zoo that is building a “sanctuary” near the “Presentation Stage” did not escape me, so I filmed this  while Julia took pictures.  Julia called him a “tusker” because he had beautiful, long tusks.  I noticed: his sweet, wise eyes; the chain he had on his front foot; and, the slight head swaying that is common among captive elephants. Nonetheless, the tourists paid to feed him, took pictures, and talked animatedly about getting the chance to feed an elephant.

It’s sort of a Catch-22: if the elephant owners have an elephant, they need to have enough money to care for it; but in order to care for it, they need to exploit it by giving tourists a novel experience.

We wrapped up filming at the zoo and then joined my friends Peter and Apple, who I met in Chiang Mai in 2007, for lunch at Suan Paak.  They have the best salads–well, the only salad I’ve found that is safe enough to eat–and the dressing is amazing!

After lunch, I filmed some elephant statues and fountains around Chiang Mai, before returning to the Uniserv to blog while sipping a cha yen and nibbling on Macadamia Pie at Doi Chang.

Tonight is the Night Market, where we hope to spot some street elephants for the documentary, and tomorrow at 7:30am we depart for Friends of the Asian Elephant.

-Windy Borman

Producer, Writer and Director, The Eyes of Thailand

P.S. Production in Thailand is scheduled until August 24, 2009.  If you’d like to make a tax-deductible contribution to help fund the production, please click here to donate through the film’s fiscal sponsor, The San Francisco Film Society.  Thank you!

This is how I roll in Chiang Mai: Aviators, Bike Helmet, I think I look like a '70s Cop from "Chips".