Little pigs are cute, but try to raise one as a house pet and you'll have problems as it gets bigger. Hog farming in North Carolina has gone through a similar cycle. When families grew a few for their own use or to send to market as an income supplement, the scale was manageable. Then it became an industry, and the state has been dealing with the consequences ever since.

As the ill effects of lax siting, construction and waste disposal practices became all too clear in the mid-1990s -- ill effects reported in Pulitzer Prize-winning detail by The N&O -- important steps were taken.

Among them were requirements that hog farms -- the barns, open-air waste lagoons and fields where diluted waste is sprayed -- be located minimum distances from property lines, homes, schools and so forth. That was meant to shield neighbors from odors, polluted runoff and possible well contamination. If a hog grower wanted to breach those rules, the adjacent property owner would have to give an OK.

Farms built before the 1995 law were exempt from the setback rules. Now, a bill being rushed through the legislature could have the effect of giving those farms a green light to keep operating right where they are, indefinitely, with no upgrade to better methods of waste disposal. The green light would even extend to rebuilding a place that had been wiped out by fire, flood, hurricane or other such disaster. Once a bad location, always a bad location?

The need for that kind of special treatment certainly wasn't made clear as the bill barreled through the state Senate this week. Somebody needs to call a time out and make sure this legislation is well-enough balanced both to address any legitimate hog industry concerns and the interests of people who must live with hog farms under their noses.

Nobody wants to make life harder yet for a grower facing the need to rebuild. But it could be reasonable to consider some tougher conditions for rebuilding -- even getting rid of the lagoons and sprayfields in favor of more environment-friendly waste disposal techniques. And let the neighboring property owner be heard.

Another feature in the bill addresses a worthwhile goal adopted by industry kingpin Smithfield Foods. The idea is to give pregnant sows -- now confined to tight stalls -- more room to move around. New barns built for that purpose would not have to abide by the setback rules.

That would be a modest move toward more humane treatment of animals that don't get much of a break en route to the pork chop case in the supermarket. But how much of a genuine hardship would it be for growers to embrace some reform of this nature and still honor the setback rules? A hardship, or merely an inconvenience with a cost that growers should be prepared to absorb?

It's true that the hog industry is an eastern North Carolina economic mainstay, but its environmental challenges have to be taken seriously. The industry has faced up to some of them but only after vigorous prodding. It has scarcely been in a hurry to embrace new waste disposal technologies that could make lagoons -- pollution pits waiting to leak, overflow or burst -- obsolete. Until the princes of pork do a better job of answering to North Carolina's environmental priorities, bills such as the current one belong on nobody's fast track.

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