Elephant abuse continues: Japanese elephants made to play Christmas music

[Guest guest]

Japan seems to have joined the elephant exploitation community. A news

module on NDTV today aired footage of elephants in Japan made to play

Christmas music. This reminded me of the difference in opinion between

elephant researchers Kisor Chaudhuri and Richard Lair. Lair is of the

opinion that elephants should earn their own keep by playing music, a

position that Kisor Chaudhuri refutes. Australian author Germaine Greer has

also mentioned that extinction is preferable to elephants being used for

painting in Thailand. Richard Lair's views can be read on the anti elephant

polo website :

http://www.freewebs.com/elephantpolo/traumavsentertainment.htm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1974498,00.html In

Thailand, 78 elephants are being taught to paint. Extinction seems a better

option

 

*Germaine Greer

Monday December 18, 2006

The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk/>*

 

Human beings have always had to relate to other animals. Even when the

relationship was simply one of hunting and eating them, the emotions

involved were complex; the animals we hunted we also deified. We drew their

handsome effigies on the walls of the caves where we roasted their

carcasses. We identified ourselves as people of this or that animal totem,

called ourselves by animal names. We used animals as imaginary friends, kept

white mice in our pockets at the same time as we poisoned their brothers and

sisters with anticoagulants. Children on farms watched their pet lambs grow

up and be shipped away to slaughter. Children sleeping in cold rooms on

their own buried their faces in the furry tummy of a toy teddy bear while

Australian children were given toy koalas covered with the fur of dead

kangaroos. Little girls make pin-ups of fluffy kittens while little boys are

spending their pocket money on live British crickets to feed to Australian

bearded dragons.

 

Through the millennia humans have been confused both about what they have in

common with animals, and about what distinguishes humans from other animals.

We have imagined that animals understood us, loved us even - and failed

utterly to understand them. We have made snap judgments about their

intelligence and discriminated between animal species on the basis of what

is simply a prejudice. We have adored furry animals with big eyes and

loathed scaly ones. We conscientiously misrepresent certain genera as sweet

when they were intensely competitive, and fantasise that frightened animals

are malevolent.

 

Now, humans are beginning to suspect that just about everything we do to

animals is wrong. There are still passionate disagreements: some of us think

it is our duty to put out feeders for wild birds; others understand that

doing so reduces wild species to the status of dependent scavengers and

compromises their survival. And some remain confused, marching to protest

against the use of animals for medical research while silently tolerating

the cruelty deployed on a far huger scale by " pest " exterminators.

 

Art can do what argument cannot. When an artist creates a whole race of

badgered and bewildered animals, as Paula Rego did in the 1980s with a

series of works in acrylic on paper, featuring dark-eyed and vaguely

malignant girls doing things to goats and dogs, we are struck by an

expressiveness beyond words in the animal bodies being forced to play a part

in the fantasies of others. Other animals look on, inscrutably, as if

judging events by their own entirely mysterious code. In Duas Meninas com

Cão of 1987, a bat-winged fox watches from a distance as two big girls force

a pair of gaudy knickers on to the kicking hind legs of a small grey dog. Is

the animal being sexualised or infantilised? Or both? Or neither? This being

art, there is no answer, but the power of the image endures.

 

Animal art used to be a matter of paintings of magnificent animals portrayed

in their glory. Every home had a print of elephants wheeling on the

Serengeti plain, a tiger burning bright amid the trees, or wild horses

cavorting on the prairie. Some of these were posed by stuffed animals in

artificial light. Nowadays we expect genuine images of real creatures, a

real moment trapped by megapixels; we go hunting with cameras rather than

guns.

 

Meanwhile, in Thailand, in a camp at Chiang Mai, 78 elephants are being

trained by leading artists to paint on canvas. One of their works, entitled

Cold Wind, Swirling Mist, Charming Lanna Number One, was sold in February

2005 for $39,000 (£20,000). The elephants paint what they have been taught

to paint, in colours they are given. Intelligent as they are, they will

never be able to portray for us what it is like to be one of the last

generation of Thai elephants. One is reminded horribly of the French

children's story, Babar the Elephant, in which Babar wears a green suit and

learns to impose a version of the ancien regime on his animal kingdom.

Extinction seems the better option.

 

It is 10 years since Aboriginal artist Peggy Napangardi Jones began painting

the figures she called simply " birds " . These two-legged figures have floppy

top-knots and beaks like outsize noses, not human but not particularly avian

either. Sometimes they look more like kangaroo rats than birds. Their linear

outline, usually red, is filled with a single pure colour, poised on a field

of another solid colour, which they often share with other similar bird

shapes. These delightful paintings break my heart. It's not just that this

prodigiously talented woman, much younger than I, is suffering kidney

failure, or because her people have been alienated from their land and

themselves. What hurts is that her bird figures are extraordinarily

expressive and yet utterly unreadable. It is as if they know they and their

reality are about to be extinguished. I bet you could find the same look in

the eyes of the Thai elephants.