I got my barnyard fix at the fair this year. While I am a sucker for the slicers, dicers and moppers in Bing Crosby Hall, I love the livestock exhibits best of all.

My husband and I, though born in suburbia, are farmers at heart. There is no farm animal I fear, save a bull or a sow with piglets. They’re noble critters, but anyone with any farm experience knows they are both subject to the whim of hormones and not in a good way.

My mother-in-law raised chickens and guinea fowl. My nieces and nephews in Oregon were 4-H members and raised sheep, pigs and cows knowing they would eventually land on someone’s plate. My mother loved nothing more than the smell of a barn, as her forefathers raised sheep in Ohio. I happily rode the neighbor’s horse and cleaned stables for a short spell in my youth.

So when my children were toddlers, I couldn’t wait to take them to the San Diego County Fair so they, too, could get up close and personal with all the lovely farm animals. My son took one step into the sheep barn, heard a sheep bleating loudly as it was being shorn, and froze in his tracks. Maybe he was a sheep in his last life, because that sound sent him flying in the other direction. It didn’t matter that I explained it was just like a haircut. He wasn’t buying it and he wouldn’t go back. My daughter was equally displeased, and was certain that shearing must feel just like it did when I combed the tangles out of her hair. (I did occasionally consider shaving her head.) We moved on to the petting zoo and when the goats tried to eat my daughter’s sweatshirt, things got really dicey.

Somehow, our pastoral heritage hid under the bed when their DNA was being sorted. It’s a very good thing my children were not expected to saddle up and cross the prairie. Once they refused to lay a hand on anything with four legs, they’d have been left behind. My son is fairly nonchalant about animals now, but it took the full 19 years. My daughter still can’t bear to hear or see any creature in discomfort, so gets no pleasure out of visiting the hot, bored show animals at the fair.

I, on the other hand, feel a summer is not complete unless I have gazed into the liquid brown eyes of a newly shorn sheep and have watched the nostrils flare on a 300-pound swine. My brother, the biologist, chided me for anthropomorphizing (giving animals human characteristics) but I need to chat with a billy goat once in a while. I need a lungful of that warm, pungent barn scent. It just puts me back in touch with the basics.

And I am a lightweight compared to my farm-boy husband. I believe zoning regulations alone are the thin wall that restrains him from raising a flock of chickens, a milk goat, a hive of bees and perhaps a peacock.

He has managed to sneak in assorted finch and parakeets and once, a box turtle, but they aren’t his first choice, because on his farm, you are a slacker unless you can produce something edible. It’s not like I didn’t know. Our honeymoon was spent on his parents’ farm in Oregon gathering eggs with wildly yellow yokes, and catching and gutting catfish from the pond for dinner.

Yup. Nothing says love like whacking the head off a fish.