Horses are bred to be domesticated, though, aren’t they? Elephants aren’t. And it does go without saying that the people who use elephants this way think it works (and is necessary for religious reasons in some cases). It’s hard for me to believe you could make elephants work all day pulling down trees, for example, if they weren’t terrified of disobeying people.
You could sort of say that elephants born in captivity are raised to be domesticated, but I believe Thai law says once an elephant reaches a certain age – 80 I think it is – it must be released into the wild. So I hope they never lose those instincts.
Here is the obligatory mention of the great 1927 silent film, Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness. Well worth seeing. Chang is Thai for “elephant.” This was filmed by Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, the same team who later went on to make the original 1933 production of King Kong. Filmed on location in northern Thailand – or northern Siam rather – using local people, which back then was no mean feat. This will show you the role of the elephant in a traditional rural family. I highly recommend this.
Yes, I think that’s certainly an important difference. But as Siam Sam says, elephants seem perfectly happy to play polo. They probably do a much better job if there is some reciprocity there, than if they’re just terrified.
Horses are bigger than you. Try getting one to give you his hoof. You really don’t want them to be terrified doing that, you want them to want to give you the hoof because they trust you. (It amazes me every time a horse will give me his hoof, what an act of trust!) I’d guess the same is true of an elephant, except now it’s 5 tonnes of animal instead of less-than-1.
As I said, I’m not saying it wouldn’t work at all. (I certainly wouldn’t want to try it, it sounds dangerous to me.) I just think people probably worked out that some reciprocity and trust works better. And that’s apparently true in what Siam Sam says about elephant polo. If you completely destroy an elephant with abuse you have 5 tonnes of crazy on your hands. It might pull down trees or it might just decide to trample you. It just doesn’t sound like the best gamble to me. Not that it wouldn’t be done, sadly.
There was an elephant who got spooked during a tournament in Sri Lanka and went on a rampage. There’s video of that. And there is a school of thought that thinks elephant polo does inherently constitutes abuse, but I can honestly say they look to be having a good time, and I have never seen anything that could be termed abuse during a tournament here. Smart guys too. My ball went into a hole when I was practicing getting used to the long mallet, and the elephant just went in with his trunk to get it out for me, on his own, no prompting.
We may be talking at cross purposes a little bit. If you have an elephant in captivity it does need to be trained somewhat or you couldn’t give it a medical examination. That can be done through positive reinforcement and kindness, not torment. I don’t know how the mahouts in the polo tournament do business, but I can believe that an elephant could play around and do the polo thing without the threat of punishment, for example. But we’re talking about something else if the elephant is elephant work all day in logging or performing at a show or giving rides. And that also applies to having an elephant sit there for a goodly while and paint something specific. I think we’re the only species that is into representational art and self-portraiture, which suggests some intensive coaching. And if there’s a lot of that and not a lot of oversight, there’s a good chance the elephant isn’t doing this willingly and hasn’t been treated well.
People have been known to give elephants stimulants to keep them working. That’s crazy. Of course those are elephants the public isn’t supposed to see, so it’s a bit different from painting - but still.
There probably often is abuse in teaching elephants to paint. But I don’t think it necessarily follows. Again, it could be all in the technique. Non-lengthy training sessions and positive reinforcement versus knocks on the head with a sharp spike, for example. It’s just that some people would have you believe it’s always knocks on the head with a sharp spike.
Oh yeah, I don’t mean the painting is unlikely to be abuse! Just that in general, I would think the non-abuse route would make a more useful elephant. But what do I know, I’ve never worked with elephants! 
There’s painting and there’s painting. At Elephantstay, they’re setting up an easel and letting the elephant mess around with paint. That could be fun for the elephant and there’s no reason you’d have to mistreat the elephant to make it do that. The examples in the OP are elephants who’ve been trained to paint flowers and trees. That’s probably long and exacting and not something the elephant would choose to do.
Since this topic can be kind of a downer, here’s an elephant (at Elephantstay) playing the piano.
Un.Real. When the other one on the right starts rhythmically shaking his bum to the music!! 
(My dog absolutely loves to hear live piano and guitar. If she had a trunk, that would be her!)
Thanks for the interesting discussion everyone.
So it seems that the elephants who paint random lines and splatters and such are probably just having fun. Perhaps they aren’t even being imaginitive or creative, but it’s certainly not abuse.
The ones where they are drawing flowers and elephants and plants, we aren’t sure about, but it’s pretty likely that the only way you could get them to do that is through a certain amount of abuse.
Is that about right?
You know, an elephant is pretty much the last creature I would want to be angry with me.
I hate disturbing aquarium fish, but they aren’t going to pick me up and throw me across the pasture. 
That link also offers another rare sight: a clever YouTube comment.
“Thelonius Trunk”
Yeah, that’s about my take. And the act of painting is probably less cruel on an elephant that working him 12-18 hours a day, or more, in the forests pulling down logs and hauling them out. But it could be symptomatic of a larger abuse pattern as well. It’s just not black and white. (As for elephants working in the forestry, many are given amphetamines to work long hours at grueling tasks and end up becoming addicts, if you can picture that.)
I’ve seen reports of elephants being forced to walk on “tightwires,” those being strong cables, but that is a sad sight. Getting them to splash around with a paintbrush or hit a few keys on a piano is one thing; making them walk a thin line and keep their balance quite another.
Just to mention, I have no connection with the nonprofit Elephantstay. I mentioned them only because they’re close to Bangkok, have a good reputation and are under close scrutiny. If there were abuse going on there, I probably would have heard about it. I don’t know anything about the group in the OP’s link, and I don’t want to dis what may be a very good outfit, but striking an alarmist tone is often a good business move. Again, it’s like child abuse – a problem is there, but it may not be quite on the level that some would have you believe, although still serious, but if you try to point that out, people think you’re condoning child abuse. Do you know what I mean?
And there have been elephants who killed their mahouts. Some due to abuse. Really, it’s not wise to piss off an animal that weighs several tons. But sometimes it’s during what’s called musth, where the elephant is in heat, and the elephant is seen to be undergoing intense grief after calming down and seeing what’s happened. Many elephants do love their mahouts.
I don’t know about the elephant painting mentioned in the OP, but I know a little about modern elephant training in US zoos. I saw a training demo at Oakland Zoo last winter, featuring a bull African elephant recently arrived from a European sanctuary where he had had little contact with people. The trainer used a whistle and a bucket of ele-biscuits as her only tools.
What I saw changed me. The trainer asked, and long chains of behaviours poured forth, mostly husbandry aids like lifting and positioning those enormous feet for maintenance, flapping an ear back for a simulated blood draw, body positions to allow protected contact exams through the barriers. There was fun stuff too: she threw him a ball which he caught and dunked in a hoop, he whirled his silly skinny tail about in circles, went pelting at top speed up the paddock after the golf cart…
So much trust, for an animal traditionally trained with a euphemistic “goad”, intended to cause pain and fear. It is certainly possible to train an elephant to do complex behaviours using positive reinforcement techniques, successive approximations, etc. I’ve seen it. But the conditions for that kind of training don’t spring up out of nowhere. They need to be built up over time, with support from above and below.
The old methods work; that’s why they’re still being used. But the new methods work better.
The handlers at Riddle’s Elephant Sanctuary here say that it is hard as hell to get them to* not* push over trees. 
More on the annual elephant-polo tournament, this year from August 28-31. In Hua Hin, a pleasant seaside town on our upper peninsula. The Anantara Group, owned by American Bill Heinecke, is a major sponsor. The tournament has royal sponsorship too, or at least used to – when she was alive, the king’s sister would come and give a little speech before each tournament on the importance of elephants to Thai society. That link also includes the benefits of elephant polo.
Bill Heinecke and his Anantara Group have done a lot for elephant conservation too.
And the World Elephant Polo Association.
Forget the “or used to” part. It still does. For any sport, tournaments can carry the “King’s Cup” designation only if it has royal sponsorship.
I visited Salem, MA today, and was drawn into the Peabody Essex Luseum by a banner showing an elephant paintinmg. It’s part of an exhibition entitled Beyond Human – Artist-Animal Collaborations. Most of the "collaborations are clearly 99+% the human part, with animals as contributors:
http://www.pem.org/exhibitions/161-beyond_human_artist-animal_collaborations
But among the pieces exhibited are two paintings made by elephants. One very abstract, the other representational, of an elephant (see above link).
The exhibit explains that this is the work of the Asian Elephant Art and Conservation Project (AEACP), founded by Alex Merano and Vitany Kumar, who founded the non-profit organization as a way to fund caring for Asian elephants who are no longer needed for logging operations. If it’s a scam, it’s taken in the museum as well. The AEACP has its own website ( http://www.elephantart.com/catalog/ ) , and they claim that the representational art is the result of a human-animal collaboration, with them human showing the elephant where to paint. As they present it, it’s not animal abuse and beatings, but the actions of artists working with already-domesticated and trained elephants, finding another activity for them that can bring in money for the foundation for their upkeep.
That sounds perfectly plausible to me.