paulmaiden95 (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)

dejen en paz a los elefantes hijos de puta

RVCAndrew (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)

Painting Elephant

SavetheAsianElephant (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)

It's one of the massive problems faced by animal behaviourists - we have no real way of seeing what animals see and think. The main ways of doing it is looking at behaviour and how it fits into the animal's evolutionary history. Obviously there is the anatomical comparisons i.e. the way the animal's eye is configured and the relative size of brain etc but so it's a lot of guess work. The fact is humans outgrew the environmental pressure animals experience a long time ago so comparisons are hard!

Whatsifsowhatsit (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)

Perhaps, but I don't necessarily think that needs to apply to the way animals perceive the world. Your message... was a reply to mine, right?Btw I like your nick.

SavetheAsianElephant (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)

OK so effectively what you are really saying is simply that the elephant must be able to lift its own trunk and picture in its head what it is supposed to paint. I see now. How profound. Yeah I'm sure cave paintings were a big help. Nothing to do with changes in diet/increased brain size/formation of language/increased social complexity/tool-weapon use/concept of farming then...I always pull out a clarinet when predator starts stalking me and if I'm really scared I'll get my big paintbrush out.

pmrooster (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)

Clearly the elephant didn't DECIDE to paint. I didn't say that it wasn't trained, or even coerced. Reread what I wrote. And you are the one who is seriously uninformed. Creativity has been with us since long before we abandoned the cave (where we learned to paint) and the hunter/gatherer lifestyle; therefore it must have evolved as part of our survival toolkit. It didn't just "happen," once we started living in houses. Oh well. I'm done with you. Good luck.

SavetheAsianElephant (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)

I don't know what you are - uninformed is probably the most likely. Otherwise why would you even conceive of the idea that these animals want to paint pictures? You can make a horse stand on its back legs and hop rhythmically in a show to applause - would you say that too had rhythm and a sense of art?? We have surpassed evolution - we are no longer under any typical selection pressures - there's little to no thinning of the herd anymore. We are not shaped by our environments are we??

pmrooster (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)

I call myself an artist so you assume I am either stupid or sentimental; I am neither. I am not anthropomorphizing the elephant. She doesn't "know what she is doing" in any context you or I would recognize. But she does possess some measure of those traits that combine to create what we think of as intelligence. And to say that humans have "surpassed evolution" is about as unscientific an assertion as I have ever heard.

SavetheAsianElephant (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)

OMG! We have so surpassed any traditional definition of evolution. We live in houses, reproduce when we feel like it, we no longer hunt and you can barely call it gather. Parallels between us and others - even apes is scientifically unsound. Animals are designed to survive, pass on their genes and continue the species. Animal time budgets revolve around this - feeding, socialising, mating, rearing offspring, NOT PAINTING, escaping predators, sourcing food NOT PAINTING, can you see a pattern???

pmrooster (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)

Once again your reply is arrogant, both toward me and the animals you pretend to know and care about, and utterly misses the point. First of all, we humans are a species of ape, and part of the animal world; as a graduate student in any subject at all you ought to be aware of that. What we identify in ourselves as "creativity," and bend to our own ends, therefore both exists in the animal world and has value in it, or it never would have evolved in the first place.