Pachyderm Discovers New Life Through Painting

For most of her 36 years, Mamie was about as submissive and timid as an 8,500-pound African elephant could get.

Living with two younger females and a younger male, she was the odd elephant out at the Knoxville Zoo.

“If you went out in the yard and said, ‘Mamie, come here,’ she would just try to make herself small or try to get away,” said handler Deborah Anderson, who arrived here this spring from the Houston Zoo. “She was just so insecure.”

Until Anderson introduced Mamie to art.

She taught Mamie to retrieve rocks. Then it was colored chalk. Finally, she brought in the brushes and acrylic paint, always heaping rewards and praise on the nervous elephant.

“Are you ready?” Anderson began one day. “Good girl,” she said as Mamie took the brush.

“Draw, Mamie,” she said, and the elephant started swishing paint across a small canvas--and sometimes across Anderson. “Oooh, Mamie. That’s a good girl.”

Over the last three months, Mamie has created about 25 paintings and 15 chalk drawings.

Her confidence has risen with all the attention.

“Now we can call her from all the way across the yard. Or if she sees the paints coming out she will be right here waiting,” Anderson said. “She knows what is happening. And for Mamie, that is a huge amount of progress.”

Mamie’s art may not be masterpieces, and her accomplishment is not unique. Other zoos have painting elephants, notably the Phoenix Zoo’s Asian elephant Ruby, whose paintings fetch $3,000 apiece.

What may be exceptional is that her caretakers couldn’t care less about the product. Her art is available for $25 in the zoo gift shop.

“I am not concerned about the paintings selling,” Anderson said. “It is nice. But more importantly, it gives her something to do.”

The Knoxville Zoo was a model for elephant programs in the 1970s, when it became the first zoo in North America to breed African elephants successfully.

But Jim Sanford, who has worked with elephants for 18 years from Portland, Ore., to Perth, Australia, found an outdated facility when he took over the Knoxville elephant program in January.

Sanford wants a larger elephant exhibit and breeding program in two years, but it won’t be financed by Mamie’s art or that of Petunia, another member of the herd that is learning to paint. And Sanford said Mamie won’t be part of a production line, as he said some zoos have done with their painting pachyderms.

“She doesn’t need to learn how to play a harmonica or paint,” Sanford said. “But these are very intelligent animals, and the more you exercise that intelligence the better off the quality of life you have for them.

“I would say feeding and cleaning an elephant is just half the job,” he said, patting Mamie’s forehead. “The other half is taking care of that big brain up there.”