Paul McDevitt

Wind in the willows

WHEN zoologist Dani Rabaiotti’s teenage brother asked her whether snakes fart, she was stumped. So she asked on Twitter, and snake expert David Steen informed her that they do. Soon, the internet was abuzz with enquiries about animal flatulence, adorned with the hashtag #doesitfart? A year later, Rabaiotti has co-authored a book titled Does It Fart?, offering an definitive guide to animals’ rear-end gas emissions, that went on sale in the US last week. Here are a few things it tells us.

Rabbits, we discover, can suffer from a gas build-up called intestinal stasis, …