CHONGQING - Is a pig that lives in a disinfected house, and takes a bath everyday and attends its own kindergarten and primary school, better than a pig that rolls in the muck?

The answer it seems is yes when it comes to breeding pigs.

More than 1,000 breeding pigs lead such a life in the breeding center of the Long Sheng company in Chongqing. They live in their own "castle" - an automated hog house that cost 40 million yuan ($6.19 million) - built on a hilltop surrounded by cliffs on three sides.

"On Monday, I send pregnant pigs into the maternity wards. Tuesday is for vaccines. And on Thursday I pick up piglets at the nursery to prepare for Friday's thorough cleanup," said Liu Yu, 26, a staff member at the pig farm.

The maternity ward is a special hog house with air conditioning and Lang Lang's piano music playing all day long. Piglets stay with their mothers in the house for 28 days until they are sent to a "nursery house".

"We make special feed stuff for the piglets so they do not miss milk," Liu said, "believe me, the feed is eatable even for humans."

Everyone entering the hog house is required follow a strict sterilization procedure, which involves standing under disinfectant skin sprays for 15 minutes and putting on shoe covers. Any staff members who return from a business trip have to spend 48 hours before seeing the pigs.

"Since our production is centralized, any exposure to a virus, especially hand-foot-mouth disease (HFMD), could mean complete disaster for the pigs," said Zhang Wei, president of the company.

Zhang invested 8 million yuan in 2008 to import 630 breeding pigs from Canada, which he believed would settle the problem of breeding pigs "genetically".

Barren hogs for commercial use are descendants of breeding pigs and their features, such as their growth rate and leanness, are decided by the genes of the breeding pigs.

"For example, our own barren hogs gain 400 to 500 grams of weight everyday, while the imported ones grow as much as 750 g a day," said Guo Zongyi, of the Chongqing Academy of Animal Sciences.

"My goal is to fix the weakest link in China's hog-raising industry. Currently, pig keepers across the country depend fully on imported breeding pigs, and are only capable of raising barren hogs and processing meat, which belongs to the downstream of the industry," Zhang said.

Zhang, who has been in the industry since 1984, said he resents the fact that good genes decayed among pigs in China because inbreeding was not controlled for decades.

In most cases, individual pig keepers purchased a number of fine breeding pigs from abroad but did not prohibit inbreeding, which caused the degeneration of the offspring, he explained.

As a result of this, breeding pigs have to be purchased abroad, mainly from the United States, Canada, Denmark and the United Kingdom About 20,000 breeding pigs are imported every year and the average price is 20,000 yuan per head. But the breeding pigs raised in the Chongqing farm, which are of the same quality, are only 6,800 yuan to 10,000 yuan.

In order to control the genes and thus select pigs with good features, foreign scientists built a complex database that tells which gene affects which character trait, and where the gene could be found.

"We started studying breeding techniques almost three decades later than foreign countries, and now we do not have so much time breeding from zero, so we import pigs with pure genes and promote breeding programs among different farms to expand the population," said Li Xuewei, head of the animal science department of the Sichuan Agricultural University.

In addition, living condition can also be decisive for the appearance of a breeding pig, which is the reason that pig keepers go out of their way to create comfortable living conditions for their pigs.

In 2010 June, the Ministry of Agriculture issued a genetic improvement plan to include 100 farms in the country in a joint breeding program by 2016, and to trace the pigs with pedigree.