Who is trickier: Man or beast?
Two and a half years ago Dali House had a gripping yarn about elephants that can paint pictures. Surely there couldn’t be much more in the trunk?
Imagine my shock to learn that that sneaky zoologist Desmond Morris has spilled the beans on the little trick that pachyderms are packing when they seem to whip up a figurative painting — as opposed to some random abstract.
As shared with the world last month via Britain’s Daily Mail, Morris was dispatched to Thailand by “his friend the scientist” Richard Dawkins to uproot the truth about elephant artistry.
To see tuskers with brushes, Morris was assured, he only had to travel outside Bangkok as far as dirty little Pattaya a couple of hours away. He set off for the Nong Nooch Tropical Garden, which has in its floral midst a dusty circus area where the elephants do their stunts.
Spying from among the mob of tourists, he watched three young female elephants painting flowers. The animals’ mahouts handed them a series of brushes daubed in different colours and seemed to stand aside while art was created.
But Morris noticed the trainers tugging on the elephants’ ears. A yank up and down was the signal to make a vertical line, a sideways pull for a horizontal one. Blobs were formed when the ears were pushed forward.
And it turned out, Morris reported, “that each of the so-called artistic animals always produces exactly the same image, time after time … Mook always paints a bunch of flowers, Christmas always does a tree, and Pimtong a climbing plant.”
Morris nevertheless graciously gave the beasts a rave review for “translating” the nudges “into attractive lines and blobs” with great precision.
In the end, Morris the secret agent was outed. The mahouts dragged him out into the open in front of the crowd, laid him on the ground and ordered one of the tuskers to give him a massage with its foot.
“I saw one of the largest elephants approaching with what I swear was an eager gleam in her eye …”
Read the ghastly conclusion on the Mail’s website. No one likes an art critic.
