The hottest thing on television isn't so-called "reality TV." It isn't vengeful redecorating of your neighbor's house, it isn't thinly veiled rip-offs of forensic science documentaries, and it isn't even a gaggle of (pick one) A)scarily bearded bikers   B)scarily moussed gay style consultants, or   C)scarily flossed cooking show hosts remaking some combination of a zhlub, his motorcycle and his dinner.

It's dinosaurs – CGI dinosaurs, to be precise – and the brutal and senseless murder thereof. And I, for one, intend to do something about it.

Oh, it all seems very educational and exciting when you see the commercials. "Meet Gigundo Fang!" the voice-over blares. "See him stalk the world of dinosaurs a hundred million years ago!" And this, of course, is accompanied by spastically-edited montage of shots showing some computer-generated prehistoric predator stomping around the Arizona veldt and laying some Jurassic smack down on an equally Tron-derived herbivore.

Sounds good, doesn't it? Sure, it's educational and all, but it's education with the sort of hits that NFL highlight films only dream of. I mean, you may think it's cool when Ray Lewis nails Ricky Williams right between the hash marks, but that ain't nothing compared to a twenty-ton T.Rex lowering its shoulder and putting the boom on a triceratops trying to go off-tackle on the Cretaceous equivalent of third-and-short. No, as much as you may try to convince yourself that your interest in the show is purely noble and scientific, that's not why you're tuning in. You're watching that show for one reason, and one reason only, and that's to see dinosaurs get eaten by other dinosaurs.

And, honestly, there's nothing wrong with that. It's the circle of life, you know, and if your kids learn about it by watching Barney's psycho uncle go all Ed Gein on a hadrosaur, well, the end result is the same. Junior learns that nature doesn't survive by going to the supermarket, and he does so watching something that's presumably a lot cooler than watching star-nosed moles eat their own body weight in insects.

It's all good, after all. Every kid loves dinosaurs, presumably because they're huge and weird-looking and extinct, and as such they make the greatest learning tool imaginable for introducing youngsters to such esoteric concepts as geology, mineralization, stop-motion video, and the 2004 North Carolina state tax code.

But sooner or later, you grow up, you see your first Godzilla movie, and you realize that the most important thing about dinosaurs is that many of them were forty feet tall and lived exclusively on the Atkins diet. That's right, nothing but raw meat for my buddy Rex and his cousin Al (note: Whoever decided to name the Discovery Channel's CGI Allosaurus "Al" needs to be dragged outside and stomped to death by a very deliberate, overweight caterpillar), and we get to watch them stalk it, chase it and chomp it. It's better than Destroy All Monsters – you don't get King Ghidorah's three-headed sonic death breath, but you do get to sit up for six hours and watch bloody dino death non-stop because you can actually tell your domestic partner that it's "educational television".

That's neither here nor there, however. We like watching dinosaurs, and we like watching them die bloodily. And those clever chaps at the Discovery Channel and the BBC have noticed this, and decided to feed our addiction in great, slab-like chunks. Every six months or so, they toss out another gem, another eight hour slice of wild hallucinations of the Mesozoic, and, fools that we are, we watch. Oh, sure, they cut to a small herd of large-eared scientists every ten minutes or so for a bit of Paleontology for Dummies, but in between the narration does its level best to fool us into thinking we know all sorts of things about dinosaurs that we'll never find out without Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine. It's nice that they postulate pack behaviors, threat displays and all sorts of other weirdness that makes good television, but the simple truth is that mating behaviors don't fossilize, so all of this is being pulled out of some animator's nether regions. No matter how solemnly Christian Slater intones it, we really don't know much about velociraptor social structures, other than to say they probably didn't wear leather jackets and sing "When You're a Jet, You're a Jet All the Way." Everything beyond that is pure speculation, and any attempt to present that speculation as hard scientific truth is, well, a little bit naughty.

Even that, however, is excusable. What is not – what is the high crime perpetrated in the name of ratings and schadenfreude and the sheer bloody-minded Hollywood mindset that says "death by Tyrannosaur snacking isn't good enough for a climax" – is the fact that in every single one of these things, the only guarantee is that at the end, all the damn dinos are going to be dead.

Yeah, yeah, I know. They are all dead. Have most likely been so for quite a while, depending on how you feel about those mkole-mbembe reports out of Zaire. But it's one thing to acknowledge paleontological fact, quite another to make sure that each segment ends with some sort of geological catastrophe raining down on our helpless CGI heroes just so the clever-boy director can do a dissolve to some vaguely germane fossils. Death by volcano? Check. Death by flood? Check. Meteor? Check. Forest fire? Check. Carbon dioxide upwelling? Check. Sandslide? Check. High cholesterol? Not yet, but give them six months.

Then, once all the grunting and bellowing and computer animation has stopped, some smug paleontologist hops on screen to tell us how this really happened, as evidenced by the arrangement of the fossil bed at Toelicker Falls, Montana. That may be the case, but what worries me is why they always have to sound so smug about it. All of the dinosaurs are dead, after all – millions and millions of them. They don't have to sound so gleeful just because they set up 3D Studio Max and snuffed a few dozen more.

Deep down, I suspect that the producers and writers of these programs are the unwitting pawns of some ancient genetic memory. No doubt our distant ancestors thought, "You'll get yours, buddy!" at passing diplodocuses while crouching, shrew-like, under cycads and giant ferns. It's that imperative, no doubt, that manifests itself in this senseless need to off as many reptiloid CGI titans as possible. Long-dead tiny mammals are no doubt looking down from Mesozoic heaven and cackling with glee every time the volcano blows its stack on Dinosaur Planet, and the animators' heads are bobbing right in unison.

Well, I'm here to say it's not right. We're bigger than that, or at least we should be. We've won, after all – we're here, and the dinosaurs aren't. And yes, they did rule the planet for 150 million years, and yes, they were bigger and cooler than we are, and had the sorts of weird bone growths on their foreheads that most urban primitives and gothlings would kill for. The fact is, you're not likely to run into an ankylosaurus on your way down to the local CVS to get your prescription filled. Why, then, do we have this continuous need to gloat, to climb our tiny mammalian bodies on top of the fallen corpses of our predecessors and let them know whose kung fu is best – albeit 65 million years too late?

No, we should be better than that. We don't need to see tsunamis and avalanches wiping out animated dinosaurs any more. We should be respectful of what those species achieved and stop taking pleasure in recreating their commercial-break-driven demises. There's no need for such a vicious dino harvest, a replay of so many untimely ends.

After all, it's much more fun when they just eat each other.