Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump shake hands before the presidential debate. Courtesy of Getty Images

By Mira Fox September 10, 2024

During the presidential debate on Tuesday, former President Donald Trump made a baseless allegation referring to an online conspiracy about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, stealing and eating people’s beloved cats and dogs.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” he said. “They’re eating the pets of the people who live there.”

The strange moment was fallout from a social media drama about an imaginary threat to Fido that’s been developing for the past several days. On Monday, JD Vance, Trump’s vice presidential candidate, tweeted about “the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio.” The post went on to mention “reports” of people having their pets abducted and eaten by unspecified illegal migrants.

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Springfield police said that they had received no reports of pets being stolen and eaten; the claim seemed to have sprung from a third-hand story in a post on Facebook claiming that a neighbor’s daughter’s friend had lost her cat and found it being carved up “like you’d do a deer” in the yard of a Haitian family.

Contributing to the rumor, bodycam footage of a woman being arrested for eating a cat went viral last month. But she was an American citizen, and she wasn’t in Springfield.

Nevertheless, the rumor instantly spread. First, the Facebook post went viral, and then Vance’s tweet. Ted Cruz posted tasteless memes of kittens begging their owners to vote for Trump so they won’t be eaten by Haitians and Elon Musk tweeted a meme from The Simpsons of characters mourning their dead cat; even the House GOP’s official X account posted a meme of an AI-generated Trump hugging a kitten and a duck. And finally, Trump brought the false conspiracy up during the presidential debate. 

The lie has echoes of another conspiracy theory: blood libel, the conspiracy theory that arose in the Middle Ages alleging that Jews killed Christian children to use their blood in matzo. Later, the Nazis invoked the conspiracy to stoke and validate hatred against Jews.

No, pets aren’t children, but today we often treat them as members of the family. In our society, eating a pet is an act of huge trespass, the likes of which, it’s understood, would only be done by someone despicable and nearly inhuman.

And, like the Jews, the Haitian immigrants in Ohio are a relatively new demographic group that has drawn local ire. Around 20,000 Haitians have moved — legally, with valid work permits — to Springfield in the past few years, taking local manufacturing jobs. It was a major shift for the town of about 60,000, and locals have been resentful, complaining about the impact on housing and schools in the area. 

Even before the allegations of stealing and eating pets, residents blamed the community for crime in the city and voiced suspicion of Vodou, a religion widely practiced in Haiti, even as a factory owner praised the reliability and work ethic of his Haitian employees, and a pastor said the community has revitalized his church. Nevertheless, white nationalists, carrying rifles and flying swastikas, marched down the streets of Springfield in August.

The speed with which that rumor spread is the result of a public discourse that has been stoking hatred against outsiders of all varieties as a threat to white, Christian America.

It’s never good for the Jews when the public is predisposed to believe in conspiracy theories against anyone unfamiliar; we’re no longer new immigrants, but we’re not the American mainstream either.

Meanwhile, the people screaming in horror about Haitians supposedly killing pets seem to have forgotten something important: Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, actually shot her dog. That’s not blood libel; she wrote about it in her own memoir.

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