County Fair Provides Swine With Their Time to Shine : Animals: Fragrance aside, pigs delight visitors at Uncle Leo’s Barn.

Forget the roast beef, these little piggies wanted milk.

It was total pandemonium in the pigpen at Uncle Leo’s Barn as the dozen piglets fought snout and hoof for a seat at the dairy bar, to the squealing delight of dozens of children watching nearby.

The piggies bobbed their heads in frenzied feeding, their coiled tails wagging to an unknown rhythm.

Lovely Michele, the 400-pound sow with a proclivity for drinking through her nostrils, lay with her eyes nearly closed, her tongue hanging about attracting flies.

“Boy, they just about got her sucked dry, I’ll tell you,” said Leo Vanoni, an area rancher who has run the Ventura County Fair animal display for 38 years.

Minutes earlier, Vanoni had risked life and limb in the cage messing with all that bacon. Lovely Michele didn’t take too kindly to his intrusion. She swung her snout and nearly floored the 79-year-old man.

But that’s how it always is in Uncle Leo’s Barn. The pigs are always up to no good--which is what makes them so popular.

Forget the lamb named Rambo or the bunny rabbits nearby. It’s the pigs they come to see.

“Oooh, they smell bad,” said Emily Berreth, 5. “But I like them. They’re so wiggly. I’m wiggly too.”

The children were noncommittal when it came to other animals.

“I like the pony, but I don’t know why,” said Coral Stone, 7, of Ojai.

The piglets were hamming it up, naturally, but not like in years past.

“People love holding them and the piggies start to relax, really relax,” Vanoni said. One year, “we counted nine or 10 accidents. Even the fair queen left with a yellow streak down her white dress.”

Last year, Madonna the mother pig was so big she didn’t even bother getting up to feed. She wanted to be fed slop in bed.

“She was so big that when she lay down, her butt went clear over to the other side of the cage,” Vanoni said.