The ethics of meat production - not to mention meat-eating - can be a difficult subject. Do we raise and kill animals for our sustenance, or for the enjoyment of eating steak, barbecue and a turkey at Thanksgiving? What does it say about us if we can't imagine life without bacon?

Frankly, it doesn't reflect too well on us humans. But if we're going to eat animals' flesh, it seems as if the least we can do is raise them under conditions that don't just add misery and insult to the "injury" they soon enough will experience. (At the slaughterhouse.)

The era of factory farms has not been auspicious in that regard. So the news of a modest -- very modest -- pending improvement in the manner by which breeding sows are treated on some corporate hog farms is worth noting as a positive development, even if there is room for plenty more.

The N&O's Kristen Collins had the story Tuesday. Smithfield Foods, the nation's largest pork company and a mainstay on the North Carolina agribusiness scene, will phase out its use of the cages in which breeding sows are confined after they are artificially inseminated and before they give birth. The confinement is now so close in the 2-foot by 7-foot cages that the pigs cannot turn around.

Smithfield will transition over a 10-year period to a system in which the sows are kept in group pens, allowing them to move more freely. Although the company doesn't concede that the cages are inhumane, it acknowledges that the change is being made in response to customer concerns.

Some growers like the current method, saying that hogs kept in pens will fight and wallow in their own mess. And no doubt it's easy to go too far in terms of imputing human-like emotions to hogs, as relatively intelligent as they are said to be.

But treating animals more like the farm animals of a not-so-distant past, instead of purely as meat production machines that are denied a right so elemental as the right to turn around, seems simply like a decent thing to do. So there are grounds to hope that Smithfield Foods' leadership on this issue gains traction, and indeed that the company expands on its efforts to raise its hogs in a humane manner. After all, considering who's going to be eating whom, it could be said that we owe the hogs something.