I may be a slick, big-city newspaper columnist who spends his days sitting at a PC trying to figure out what the “Scroll Lock” key does, but dag nab it, I know a surgically enhanced cow teat when I see one.

This specialized knowledge comes from years of attending livestock competitions at my hometown state fair.

But even I was unaware of the extent to which cosmetic surgery and other illicit practices have been running rampant at state fairs nationwide – events that have been a beloved summer tradition since 1945, when Rodgers & Hammerstein transformed them from mere gatherings of oversized agricultural products into gatherings of oversized agricultural products that sing and dance.

Unscrupulous farmers at livestock competitions employ such practices in an effort to clinch top honors, which invariably lead to lucrative modeling contracts for their cattle, swine, sheep and fowl.

From there, even more lucrative TV deals often follow, as we saw earlier this month with the launch of “The Anna Nicole Show.”

This scandal first came to light at the 1994 Ohio State Fair when 70 percent of the prize-winning animals tested positive for illegal drugs.

Judges were tipped off by one particularly hopped-up ox that took to the stage and performed a screaming, feedback-filled rendition of “Purple Haze,” before setting its guitar on fire.

Subsequent years saw these types of abuses proliferate throughout the Farm Belt, to the point where, according to a report in The New York Times, they included:

“Implanting padding in dairy cows to give them balanced udders . . . injecting chemical irritants to swell narrow-chested hogs [and] injecting corn oil into steers to plump their rear ends.”

Flip on Animal Planet or pick up a copy of Modern Farmer and you’ll see nothing but impossibly corpulent heifers and pigs, with stumpy legs and high shoulder blades – standards your average barnyard quadruped could never live up to.

The Dept. of Agriculture has taken aggressive steps to stamp out corruption within the livestock circuit. These include mandatory drug testing, the banning of offenders from future competitions and electronic surveillance of suspicious-looking chickens.

Still, my fear is that our nation’s state fairs – once synonymous with hard work, moral rectitude and butter sculptures in the shape of Abraham Lincoln – have been forever tainted, and, as such, will invite a more nefarious brand of corruption.

The New York State Fair kicks off this week in Syracuse, and already there have been rumors of the mob muscling in on some of the attractions.

As one story goes, entrants in the pie-eating contest will have to qualify by ingesting 25 anchovy, sausage, and green-pepper pizzas – trays and all.

Another has it that the hayride drivers will be forced to pay their new bosses $600 a week for “protection.”

Either that, or work with headless horses.