Elephants are my new favorite animal.

That is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. IN. credible. We need to have some kind of folder here for faves!

That is amazing, but I'd really like to know if the elephant figured the picture out herself or if she was trained where to paint the lines.

Even if she was trained...it is still amazing. I have seen this before, and I still gape at it. An elephant that can paint! Awesome.

Very impressive, but I'm highly skeptical the elephant learned to do it itself or even has any idea what it is drawing. Seemingly simple things like outlines are very hard to comprehend to an untrained eye, and something like using a line to represent the ground is even more abstract.

It would be interesting to place three simple line art drawings in front of an elephant, two of them meaningless shapes, and one of an elephant. If the animal has different reaction to the meaningful drawing, we know it understands a very abstract representation of a physical object.

Some might say I'm not giving the elephant enough credit, but you might be amazed at the vast amount of symbolic knowledge uniquely infused in the human brain. It creates something of a bias as to what a drawing "obviously" represents.

Opps, I misread the title, I thought it said "Elephant Penis Self-Portrait".

Ok, since last night I have done some research. It turns out that the elephant's trainers taught the brush strokes to him by rote. So this is a learned behavior. :(
I find this revelation both good and bad. It's bad, because I was so hopeful that this was evidence of elephants being way more "intelligent" than we thought. But it's good because now I don't have to change my entire world view. :)

Well how many other animals out there have been trained by humans to paint pictures of themselves? Still marvelous, I think.