Blame It on the Dog by Jim Dawson

industry,” Bevington deadpans.
    Wait a second, is he pulling my leg?

BEST-SELLING DOG FARTS AT MAN!
    D og bites man, that’s not news. But when a farting dog makes the
New York Times
Book Review section, that’s a sound bite.
    On April 15, 2004, a forty-page children’s book called
Walter the Farting Dog
—the story of a lovable but gassy family pet who can’t even gobble down a bag of low-fart dog biscuits without stinking up the house—went to number one on the
New York Times
list of best-selling books. It also topped the reading charts at the
Boston Globe
and
Publishers Weekly
. “[Walter] can’t help it,” said the ad line from the publisher, North Atlantic Books. “It’s just the way he is. Fortunately, Billy and Betty love him in spite of it. But their father says he’s got to go! Poor Walter, he’s going to the dog pound tomorrow.”
    Fortunately for Walter, the authors had seen the film
Home Alone
, so they introduced a couple of hapless burglars who break into the house the night before the hound is bound for the pound and, well, you know what happens next, even if you haven’t forked over $15.95 for this skimpy book. Walter chases the poot-phobic perps, “choking and gasping for air,” into the clutches of the police.
    Funny, I don’t remember Dick and Jane having such problems with Spot. There was never “Look, Jane, see Spot fart.”
    Walter the Farting Dog
had first been published two-and-a-half years earlier, in late 2001, for kids from four to eight, but their parents, who apparently remembered their own crepitating canines from childhood (or at least the family pets who took the rap for everyfart in the house), embraced it, too. The book became so popular it was translated into several languages, including Latin (
Walter Canis Inflatus
).
    Two
Walter the Farting Dog
sequels followed. The first was
Trouble at the Yard Sale
(2004), in which Walter ends up in the hands of a thief who tricks him into blowing up balloons with a special “fart catcher” by telling him they’ll be used at a children’s party. But what the guy is really planning to do is take the balloons into a bank and burst them to overwhelm the tellers with clouds of choking gas. Then came
Rough Weather Ahead
(2005), the story of what happens when a special doggie diet food that’s supposed to cure Walter’s flatulence only makes it worse. Walter’s digestion gets so bad that he bloats up like a balloon, floats out the window, and hovers in the sky for days, until he’s able to release all the hot gas inside him to save millions of butterflies trapped in a freezing windstorm.
    “All in all, it’s a gas,” said
Booklist
, without mentioning that the book’s most dramatic scene may have been inspired by Cervantes’s prologue to the second part of his sixteenth-century masterpiece,
Don Quixote
, in which a madman goes to the center of Seville, gathers a crowd, grabs the rear legs of a stray dog, inserts one end of a hollow reed into its anus, puts the other end in his mouth, and starts blowing. The crowd watches, transfixed, as the dog inflates like a balloon. When its belly is grossly round and full, the man lets it run away, with air escaping in a noisy rush from its ass. Then he turns to the crowd and asks, “How think you, my masters, is it a small matter to blow up a dog like a bladder?”
    Walter the Farting Dog
has inspired similar children’s books. When the two
Walter
sequels moved to Dutton Books’s juvenile division, North Atlantic Books replaced him with
Little Lord Farting Boy
, about a flatulent bear named Arty, written by one Scootchie Turdlow. Then there’s
Pee-Ew! Is That You, Bertie?
by David Roberts (published in 2004 by Harry N. Abrams), about a boy whose farting is so plentiful and odoriferous, everybody else feels free to fart in his presence because they can put the blame on him. Meanwhile, the sales of earlier children’s books like Francisco Pittau’s
Terry Toots
, Taro Gomi’s
Everyone