Miss Piggy’s posse

Danette Goulet

FAIRGROUNDS -- On wobbly two-inch legs, 11 wriggling piglets fought

for position closest to their mother, Miss Piggy, Wednesday morning at

the Orange County Fair.

Each weighing less than a pound, the newest additions to the fair’s

Maternity Barn were born just after 5:30 p.m. Tuesday.

The 500-pound Yorkshire Cross Blue Butt sow delivered her first litter

in less than two hours, said Sarah Bennett, the 11-year-old from Tustin

who raised Miss Piggy.

“This was my first pig,” Sarah said. “When we got her we had to feed

her and clean out her pen each day.”

Sarah sold Miss Piggy at the fair last year, when the sow was entered

in the market show and chosen as the grand champion. The buyer donated

her to Centennial Farm, which operates year-round on the fairgrounds.

“She’s one of the lucky ones,” said Kim Kowitz, whose mother helps

teach children how to raise pigs for the market. “She’s a mama [so] she

won’t go to market now.”

The fate of the unnamed piglets, their eyes barely open, is not so

certain, however.

While they will all go back to Centennial Farm for now, most will be

sold at market, or to groups such as the 4-H Club, for market programs,

said Fay Kowitz, the pig leader for the Orange Villa Buckaroo 4-H Club.

In the meantime, the litter sleeps, waking only when their mother

begins to grunt, indicating that she is ready to feed them.

It is then that the piglets groggily climb over one another.

When the milk is gone, they curl up once again, several jolting with

hiccups from eating so fast.

Only one insatiable little piglet is left at his mother’s teat, sound

asleep.