What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: Immigrants and Pets

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The 2024 presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump was only a week ago. Long after everything else from it is forgotten, people are likely to remember one moment: when Donald Trump claimed, "In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating the pets of the people that live there."

For many Americans, this baseless claim was so out of left field it was absurd, hilarious—the perfect subject for memes and jokes—but it was also memorable. Polling shows it was the main takeaway from the debate. About 67 million people heard the claim when it was first uttered, and according to a YouGov poll, only 39% of Trump supporters think the claims about pet-eating are "definitely false," and that's a lot of people who believe something that just isn't true.

No one is eating pets

The first debunking of the claim was instant. Debate moderator David Muir pointed out there was no evidence that this was happening, citing Springfield's City Manager. In the following days, that City Manager, the Mayor of Springfield, and the city's police department all shot down the claim. So did the Governor of Ohio and many, many others.

At the debate, Trump defended his claim by saying, "I saw it on TV," but that was most likely a lie, too. BBC searched the video archive of "every major U.S. broadcaster, including Fox, CNN and CBS," and was not able to find "any televised interview of this nature."

So if the accusation that Haitians are eating our pets didn't come from the real world and it didn't come from something Donald Trump saw on TV, where did it come from? The fringes of the internet.

The sources of the "pets are being eaten" lie

The sources at the bottom of this claim are the kind of rumors and chatter that's all over your city's NextDoor page right now: A Springfield resident made a Facebook post about what she heard happened to her daughter's friend's lost cat. A woman, neither an immigrant nor Haitian, in a different city in Ohio was accused of killing a cat. The Springfield police fielded a couple of no-evidence calls about people stealing geese from the park. JD Vance re-posted a video shot in Dayton, not Springfield, of a non-immigrant, who isn't Haitian, grilling something and claimed it was a cat (even though many point out that it looks a lot like a chicken).

According to NBC news, a small neo-Nazi group called Blood Tribe took this scant "evidence" and started spreading the "Haitians are eating the pets" rumor in August on Gab and Telegram. People on Facebook and X ran with it. JD Vance posted about it. According to Trump's friend Laura Loomer, the Springfield rumor “made it to his desk. He was made aware of what these residents were saying.” And the rest is memes that you send to your family text chat.

This is a dark and depressing story, but the silver lining that I see is the speed and thoroughness of the debunking of this rumor. I doubt most people who heard the claim for the first time at the debate believed it. According to a poll from Data for Progress, 80% of all respondents described the pet-eating claim as "very weird" or "somewhat weird."

Even JD Vance doesn't seem fully on board any more. When asked about pet-eating by CNN's Dana Bash, the vice presidential candidate said, "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do." (Although in the same interview, he added, "I say we're creating a story meaning we're creating the American media focusing on it," so interpret it as you will.)

But even though "immigrants eating pets" has been thoroughly debunked, there is this one guy who keeps repeating it.