I know, I know, I'm posting like crazy here. Anyway... you know me, reading political articles everywhere, and I saw one where the Republican party was really very much shown as an elephant. Well, it is an elephant... sort of....

Anyway, this got me thinking about elephants. Real elephants. And I remembered that about two months ago I had seen snippets of a documentary about elephants who were artists. For real. They liked to paint, and they made their own artwork, painting with paintbrushes held at the end of their sensitive trunks. This documentary I saw small parts of showed us a female elephant, named Hong or Heng or Cheng or something, who was so good that her artwork was exhibited at a big and prestigious London gallery. The funny thing was that the critics, who were invited to see her exhibition, were only told that the paintings were by 'Hong' (or whatever her name was), not that Hong was an elephant! And they judged, praised and criticized her artwork just as if she had been a human artist, which, of course, they thought she was!

Well, I decided to try to find this elephant on YouTube. I don't think I succeeded, but I found this video of a painting elephant instead. You've got to watch it. Seriously.

Ann

She died a few years ago, but there was a painting elephant named Annabell at the Anchorage zoo. The paintings really sold for hundreds of dollars!

Kind of neat/funny fact: The zoo was actually built FOR Annabell. Her owner won a contest (I don't know what for) and the prize was either $3000 or a baby elephant, and he chose the elephant. Then he decided to make a place for other animals that needed rescuing where the public could go to learn about them.

The painting thing is very cool, though! She was definitely a big hit.