Steve, just admit it, you only like trout because they wind up as bass food. LOL.

On a serious note, I am always interested in cases where humans try to modify animals and their habitat to bring things back to some type of original state. Search online about restoring wolves to Yellowstone or Bighorn Sheep to the Eastern Sierras. I just watched a show last week about the Bighorn sheep deal. Its crazy, they hunt down mountain lions in that area, then they put a radio collar on them. Then they monitor the lions to see if they are getting near the sheep. If they get too close to the sheep and start preying on them, they kill the lions. Is that a good strategy or a bad one? Tough question.

On a less dramatic level, my Mom is a docent for a project where they are trying to restore the snowy plover population around Santa Barbara. Basically they sit at the beach all day and try to keep people and dogs from trompling them while they're in the nest. Is this a good strategy or a bad one? It seems like a good idea to me, but tell that to a pissed off dog owner.

In regards to trout, I feel fine about the current trout programs around the state, and hope the hatcheries continue to operate and stock lots of trout in the appropriate places. Defining appropriate places is the crux of the issue though.

Take this real life example...

The Santa Ynez river historically had a large steelhead run. These steelhead have been identified as being genetically different than other steelhead along the coast and are called the Southern Steelhead. The Southern Steelhead as far as I know is now listed as an endangered species. Lake Cachuma was built on the Santa Ynez and put a huge dent in the steelhead run to the point where only a few fish make the migration any more, and only on high water years.

I happen to know for a fact that when lake Cachuma spills, the planted rainbow trout in the lake spill over the dam in to the river below. I know this because I've fished the river below the dam years ago and we caught a large number of trout that were very obviously planter trout. They were big and were starting to regrow their fins, but I don't need a scientific study to show me that these were planters. One can only assume that there is a risk that these stocked trout will provide competition for native Southern Steelhead that make it up the river and that they will also potentially breed with them.

So Cachuma is a resevoir, but Cachuma's stocked trout are very likely to have an impact on native fish when they wash over the dam. Should trout stocks stop at Lake Cachuma? It would sure put a dent in the swimbait bite at that lake. Where do our priorities as angler's lie? What are our obligations to the natural environment?

It seems to me that there are too many complicated situatoins like this out there to make a definitive comment about what should and should not be done. I'd advocate for a case by case review any time new waters are scheduled to be stocked with fish, and I can only hope that the people in charge of deciding where fish are stocked can make decisions that benefit both the environment and the angler.