Massachusetts stocks lots of trout. Should it?

In all this spring, half a million trout will be loosed into places like Walden Pond in Concord, the Brookline Reservoir, and, most visibly, at Jamaica Pond in Boston, an event that has served as prized photo-op for governors through the years.

Other than a few public events, the stocking happens in stealth. The state will not post that the body of water has been stocked until the following day, to give the fish a chance to get settled before they’re targeted. But the trucks are often spotted and word spreads quickly.

Not that the state doesn’t want these fish to be caught. That’s the whole point, because these species are not suited for our summer waters, and any that are not taken by fishermen (or animals like eagles and otters) will die when the temperature warms. Which is why the game resumes again in the fall, when the trucks return with a new payload of fish to dump into the cooling water.

It is not a restoration effort. The state is clear about that, and those restoration efforts focus on our only native trout species, Eastern brook trout. Though many are confused about this. Plenty of anglers throw the stocked fish back because they mistakenly believe they’re contributing to conservation.

No, this is what is known as a “put and take” fishery. They put the fish there so anglers can take them and eat them. The eating is a core principle of the program, and comes with the sad bonus that the hatchery-raised fish are safe to eat, unlike many of our wild freshwater species, which have advisories because of environmental contaminants.

The game is expensive to put on, and anglers cannot opt-out financially. Everyone who purchases a freshwater fishing license is putting quarters into the game whether they want to play or not. The trout stocking program costs about $3 million each year and eats up nearly three-quarters of the money the state takes in from those licenses.

It is among the reasons the cost for a freshwater license was recently raised to $40, while a saltwater license remains $10.

Many states have trout stocking programs, and the arguments for it acknowledge it is an unnatural game but argue that it serves an important role in our unnatural modern world. It encourages outdoor recreation in an accessible way, and without it many would never have the opportunity to catch or even see a trout (which rank second only to bass as the favorite fish to catch in state angler surveys). The opportunity to harvest “wild” food, the argument goes, is a gateway to get people deeper into the outdoors and conservation.

“That’s basically my story,” said Chris Borgatti, the Eastern Policy & Conservation Manager for Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving America’s outdoor heritage.

Borgatti, 48, got the outdoors bug as a kid while fishing for stocked trout in the Charles River at the South Natick Dam.

“Not long after that, I didn’t want to catch stocked trout,” he said. “I wanted to hike up some stream with a fly rod and catch little brook trout. That was the nature experience I was after.”

Still, Borgatti would be listed as conflicted about the whole program, able to see both sides of the argument, and the holes in each one.

This winter, the Berkshires Environmental Action Team, a nonprofit based in Great Barrington, began a campaign to stop the stocking program. They have questioned the ecological impact on the native brook trout and the invertebrates that the stocked trout feed on, as well as argue it’s impossible to release so many non-native fish into the wild without having a negative impact on the ecosystem.

Mass Wildlife, the state conservation and wildlife management agency that runs the trout stocking program, said that there are 1,337 wild trout streams in the state, and it only stocks fish in 120 of them. Agency scientists believe the impact to native fish is negligible, partly because the stocked fish don’t live very long.

“Trout stocking and wild trout conservation are complementary components of science-based fisheries management,” Eve Schlüter, acting director of MassWildlife, said in a statement. “Stocking connects hundreds of thousands of anglers to nature each year, generates license revenue that supports conservation, strengthens local economies, and bolsters food security.”

She went on to say the agency remains committed to wild trout conservation and restoring habitats, and that agency biologists “carefully evaluate how and where fish are stocked, using the best available science to balance recreational opportunity with long-term stewardship of wild trout populations.”

The Berkshires Environmental Action Team has also raised questions about the environmental impact of the state hatcheries themselves, framing them as expensive, polluting factories, even as MassWildlife is seeking millions to upgrade them to continue the popular program. (The state’s trout stocking page is one of the most-visited on the mass.gov site, according to MassWildlife.)

“We don’t dispute that it’s popular,” said Brittany Ebeling, the group’s executive director. “But that end doesn’t justify the harm incurred by supporting this factory farming thing.”

The McLaughlin Fish Hatchery in Belchertown, the state’s oldest and largest, is in urgent need of modernization. Governor Maura Healey’s Mass Ready Act has proposed $20 million “for the rehabilitation, reconstruction, modernization, and decarbonization” of the hatchery, and it is working its way through the legislature, according to a MassWildlife spokesperson. That hatchery produces half of the fish for the program.

Back at Horn Pond in Woburn, Matt Riley of Cambridge was part of the crowd that had come this final Saturday of March because it was the first body of water body in the area to be stocked this year.

“I like it,” Riley said as he watched his son and a friend fish for rainbow trout that had been stocked three days earlier. “A pond like this gets fished-out otherwise, so this regenerates the spot and gets all these people out here. This is urban fishing.”

Last year, he and his son were fishing at White Pond in Concord, and as they were leaving they passed a MassWildlife truck pulling in. Riley knew what that meant. They turned around, and within five minutes were pulling dinner out of the water.

On this day, the two boys weren’t having much luck, even though they were going about it the right way, by trying to lure the fish with what they’re used to eating. Instead of flies or lures, they were using something called PowerBait, little scented balls that are meant to mimic the pellets the trout were fed in the hatchery.

An unnatural game for an unnatural world.

Billy Baker can be reached at billy.baker@globe.com. @billy_baker.