The extension of human activities to animals, demonstrating the degree to which this is possible, is brought to public notice from time to time. Paintings by elephants appear to have first aroused public interest in 1970 when the elephant Carol from the San Diego Wild Animal Park painted some pictures on an American television programme, "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson. Carol's exploits encouraged Don Redfox, the elephant manager at Toledo, Ohio, Zoo, to teach his elephant Rasha to paint. Whereas Carol's paintings were primarily for human amusement, Rasha's paintings were encouraged as a way of enriching the animal's life in the zoo, which recruited a "behavioural enrichment specialist" to help provide a stimulating environment for the animals. Some zoos refused to teach the elephants to paint on the ground that it was unnatural, while others encouraged it with the intention of easing the boredom of captivity (i.e. for the same reason that human prisoners in some gaols have been encouraged to paint). At Knoxville, Tennessee, Zoo, "animal enrichment" was the motive for teaching Mamie to paint, and after her a younger generation including Tonka (the only male among those mentioned here), Ellie, and Jana. Their paintings are executed with the brush held in the trunk, on paper fixed to an easel. In appearance their paintings are similar to some examples of "Action painting", which, according to the Dictionary of Art, London 1996, vol. 1, p. 131, are characterized by "psychological freedom and physical engagement with materials ... impulsive brushwork, visible pentimenti and unstable or energetic composition, which seemed to express the state of consciousness held by the artist in the heat of creation". They could also be considered extreme examples of "Outsider art" or "Art brut". See further David Gucwa and James Ehmann, To whom it may concern: an investigation of the art of elephants, New York ca. 1985, and Dick George, Ruby: the painting pachyderm of the Phoenix Zoo, New York 1995
