Pepé le Pew

Waffle passed wind last week and I swear to God, the stench was so severe, I almost lost consciousness. The reek was a corruption of burnt rat hair, rotten eggs and festering fish and it was the kind of smell that somehow made its way to my taste buds.

The incident reminded me of that joke about the priest visiting an elderly lady and her dog named Patch. After the man of the cloth passes wind, the old woman cries, “Patch!” and the priest believes the dog has been blamed.

This passing of wind happens three times and the cunning padre thinks he has avoided culpability. However, following the last ‘letting-go’ the old woman says, “Patch! Move away from there before that man follows through.”

In the case of my own Hairy Fool, he had no-one else to blame except himself although he didn’t seem one bit put out by the pong, that is, not until I roared at him to vacate the vicinity. Waffle complied although I’m fairly sure the wagging of the tail only succeeded in wafting the sulphurous fumes into my face. I can smile about it now of course but at the time, it wasn’t one bit funny.

The problem however is that, Waffle being a social animal, he silently returned without my noticing (I was watching TV at the time) and then passed wind again, another silent but deadly eruption of the most vicious vapours. This one was a sleaze of rotting onions, out-of-date diesel and the septic tank on a hot day.

“Jeez, dog,” I said, immediately trying to breathe through my mouth (this didn’t help except that the toxic miasma seemed to coat my throat. “That smells as though your guts are in bother.”

I’ve heard it said that if something happens once, there is a chance of it happening again.

But if it happens twice, you can be sure it’ll happen a third time.

However, in the case of the farting Waffle, the third time wasn’t the charm.

Even though the Hound had taken up residence on the far side of the room, when the third chemical warfare attack detonated, I was immediately overwhelmed.

“God Almighty, dawg, that’s even worse!”

This one offered the decrepitude of a dead man’s breath, potatoes boiled dry and a port-a-loo at a chilli cook off. Although I wouldn’t consider myself a cruel person, I nevertheless encouraged Waffle from the house via some loud and quasi-delirious threats to his life. The truth was, I feared his furry rear-end might be harbouring some vestiges of the malodorous, rancid stink.

“Let the wind blow round you there for a while,” I told him, all but slamming the front door in face. “Maybe walk backwards into a gale for a while. Good boy, Waffie.”

Back into the living room, I opened a window and cracked out my phone. I typed into Google, “What is making my dog fart?”

Although I wouldn’t consider myself a particularly impatient person, Google returned 75,700,000 results.

“Turns out you’re not the only canine farter in the world,” I said to a forlorn Waffle who at that moment was gazing at me through the window.

According to The People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals
(which was the topmost result on Google), “Farting is a normal part of digestion.

“Smelly or excessive farting in dogs can be caused by a change in diet or eating something they shouldn’t. Farting can also be caused by eating too fast.

“Some medical issues can cause farting, so speak to your vet if you’re concerned.”

Another website, petplate.com had an exquisite pearl of wisdom to share: “In general, your dog’s flatulence is just a brief moment of unpleasantness and nothing more.”

A brief moment of unpleasantness? Nothing more? Do the people at petplate.com even have noses on their faces? Unfortunately, there was no happy ending to this story, which is to say, Waffle was latter permitted re-entry to the house and he continued to fart the night away, each one somehow worse and more putrid than the last. They were noxious olfactory hallucinations, they cauterized my scent receptors, they stank.

And we didn’t live happily ever after.