Apparently not. Shauna Ahern of the famous Gluten-Free Girl blog [3] is paid to write a blog for the National Pork Board [4]. She just wrote a piece [5] about a factory hog farm she visited and how wonderful it was. Here's an excerpt:

The entire place felt warm. Even though there were something like 2,500 pigs there, taken from birth to the market (farrow to finish, in pork production terms), the whole place felt calm and well-kept. It felt like a home.

I've been to a factory hog farm, too, and it was also a "family farm." But that didn't change the fact that there were 4,000 pigs crammed into one building eating unhealthy diets and unable to engage in natural hog behaviors, like rooting. If it felt like a home, it was a home sitting on top of half a year's worth of hog manure.

Truly, it was no more of a home than a crowded subway car at rush hour would be a home for humans if it were sitting on top of a cesspool of excrement instead of train tracks. That's more than just disgusting -- in some cases it's deadly: just last week two men died [6] from suspected methane gas poisoning at a factory hog farm in Nebraska.

If you'd like another perspective on factory hog farms, check out the film Pig Business [7], and check out how the pork industry tried to keep people from seeing it. [8]