Does an elephant know it's an elephant?
Does it know what an elephant looks like?
Does it know that other elephants are elephants?
Does it equate the other elephants it sees to the concept of "an elephant" and also to its own self-image?
Can it understand a two-dimensional representation of a three dimensional object?
Can it make decisions with regard to what are and are not the essential anatomical features of an elephant?
Can it make the necessary intuitive leaps to render those features as linear figures?
Does it see in full colour?
Does it make imaginary flights in its mind involving the distortion of spatial relationships and relative scale of objects?
Does it want to express these imaginings to human beings and does it comprehend that human beings have minds capable of interpreting that expression?
And finally, does it derive pleasure from the process?
Because the answer to all those questions has to be "yes" before this can be considered as anything other than as charmless and disturbing a sight as the self-same animal performing in a conga line or teetering atop a giant ball, and I dread to think what methods were used in order to have the beast do it.

Hard to imagine what an extra-terrestrial intelligence would have made of last night's British television, as our attitude toward other species was examined.

Things kicked off in firmly grim territory as the newscasts covered a staggering case of mass neglect, some hundred or more equines having been left to starve to death on a farm in Buckinghamshire. This was followed by cuter fare with BBC1's Elephant Diaries. Orphaned elephants, hand-reared and prepared for a return to the wild in a Kenyan national park. Bit unfortunate, considering all the recent strife in the region, that the whole thing should come off as such a relic of colonial Africa; dutiful black males working under a blubbery white matriarch. Lots of tacit references to the quasi-mystical bond that exists between the animals, blatant anthropomorphous characterisation and, as the coup de grace, a tiny and half-blind calf trained to follow the sound of a keeper's stick hitting the ground, whose health and vision return only to suddenly go off its food and die by end credits. Hankies all round.

Next up, as part of Channel 4's ongoing The Big Food Fight season, mop-topped River Cottage-dwelling organic foodie Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Chicken Run three-parter reached its conclusion. Again, strange timing, as it hit our screens on the day the government announced an up-coming ban on battery-farmed eggs. The point of the C4 show was to highlight the difference between the quality of life for free-range and intensively farmed table birds and to explode the often exaggerated difference in cost. This was interspersed with Fearnley-Whittingstall's experiments in attitudinal change, both micro (encouraging a handful of families to rear and then slaughter their own chickens) and macro (attempting to confront the major retailers over their often misleading labelling and presentation of chicken meat). A month-long campaign to turn Axminster into Britain's first free-range town was, by the cook's admission, a failure; so long as the pub-dwellers of the town resented the haranguing of a bloke off the telly, whom they suspected of self-aggrandisement, and take-away proprietors laboured under the belief that they'd have to charge £15 for a free-range kebab, the initiative was doomed.

What the show had in common with a later offering, BBC3's Kill It, Cook It, Eat It, as well as programmes to come in The Big Food Fight season (especially the heavily trailed Jamie's Fowl Dinners, in which it appears the lisping Mockney will mince live chicks in front of some vomiting diners) was frank depictions of slaughter and butchery. This trend reached its apotheosis in yesterday's episode of the BBC3 show, now in its second series and subtitled The Baby Story, as it focused on the perennial bette noir of veal. In the space of an hour long programme, a number of live veal calves where slaughtered, cleaned, butchered and their meat cooked and eaten on camera. The producers attempted to maintain as clinical a point of view as possible, claiming the manner in which veal calves are raised- especially in this country- is not necessarily as unpleasant as many believe while underlining that male calves are an unwanted part of the dairy industry and will be killed regardless of whether they are to end up smothered in aubergines and parmesan or not. However, confronted with widdle baby cows, they could not resist a small streak of sentimentality, referring to two calves as "brothers". Even if this were semantically accurate (unlikely, since dairy cows generally have just one calf a year) it's needlessly emotive language in what purports to be frank analysis of meat production.

Taken as a whole, the only possible conclusion that could be drawn from these shows is that 21st century Britons are hopelessly at sea over animals. The cosy, dewey-eyed wildlife docudramas are nothing new, but what are we to make of these new "hard edged" meat critiques? What is their ultimate purpose? To bait animal rights activists? Promulgate vegetarianism? Outrage censorious busybodies? Lure gore-porn addicts? Shame capitalists? Indict the working class meat eater?

One of the audience invited to the veal programme charged those who happily consume milk, butter and cheese but not veal with hypocrisy, saying we must either support the dairy industry in consuming all its produce or opt out entirely. That's precisely what another guest did, a vegetarian claiming on-the-spot conversion to veganism. Admittedly, her stance seemed to based less on a sound analysis of the rights and wrongs of farming and more a visceral reaction to the sight of an animal's death. "That's a life," she said, "I don't need to take that life to survive." Btw, I'm heartily sick of this "survival" argument; there are many, many things humans don't need to survive. If that's your rationale behind dietary choices, why not abandon clothing, housing, culture and language as well, because all we need to "survive"- albeit for far less than four score and ten- is a hole in the ground, some dry sticks to burn and pointy ones to dig up tubers. I'll say it again; animals rights are a red herring. The proper and more challenging debate is about what humans have and have not the right to do to animals and each other. It's a subtle difference but a crucial one, as it denies grave-robbing, guinea pig loving lunatics any claim to the moral high ground.

Should the ethics of consumerism be publicly debated? Absolutely. Does the contention that the shopping basket is more powerful than the ballot box hold true? Probably, sadly, yes. But it's a shame that our moral quandry over delicious, nutritious, bloody, lethal meat is so often allowed to mask the greater and surely more important human misery that fuels almost everything else on our shopping lists. The injustices that bring us our coffee, tea, sugar, chocolate, fruit & veg and cut-price clothing. A documentary about sustainable land management, food miles, carbon emissions, low-paid workers, child welfare, international trade subsidies and tax reform, however, will never be as sensational as one in which an animal's throat is cut as it twitches on the meat hook. That we are exercised at all by the plight of a lame African beast while African humans still starve is a pitiful statement on us all. And the celebrity tub-thumpers play on, determined to disgust and scare us now we've become inured to their simple nagging.

Contemplate "sending a message" via how you spend your money by all means, but think about how you spend your evenings as well.