and othersLess than 30 minutes into Tuesday’s presidential debate, former President Donald Trump deployed an updated version of a century-old slur against immigrant communities: that newcomers eat other people’s pets and vermin.
“They’re eating dogs, they’re eating people who are coming in, they’re eating cats,” Trump said of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. Over the past four years, 15,000 Haitians have settled in the city of about 60,000, most of them through a legal resettlement program for immigrants. “They’re eating the pets of the people who live there. This is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”
While city officials acknowledged they hadn’t received any such reports and quickly decried the unfounded allegations, the false claim that Haitians eat pets spread on right-wing social media and was quickly amplified by conservative lawmakers. Ohio Sen. and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance wrote to X on Monday about reports that “illegal Haitian immigrants” were kidnapping and eating pets and causing “havoc” in Springfield.
Haitians say such xenophobic attacks are nothing new to their community, and experts say the “dog eat dog” trope is a fear-mongering tactic long used by white politicians against people of color, particularly Asian immigrants.
“The way white Americans position themselves as culturally and morally superior is an easy way to stoke xenophobia very quickly,” said Anthony Ocampo, a sociology professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.
May-Lee Chai, an author and creative writing professor at San Francisco State University, said demonizing immigrants by spreading false information about their diets is a political tactic that originated in the late 19th century, when anti-Chinese sentiment was at its peak.
According to the book “Early Asian American Reminiscences: Cultural History Essays,” before the 1888 presidential election, Grover Cleveland’s campaign issued trading cards featuring a cartoon-style drawing of a Chinese man eating a rat and denigrated his opponent, Benjamin Harrison, as the “Chinese candidate for president.”
“It’s a very old political trope to dehumanize male Chinese immigrants and portray them as a threat to white American workers,” Chai said. Chinese workers are not just a “labor threat” in the restaurant industry, she added, but also a “civilizational threat,” since one of the justifications for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was that Chinese immigration would “brown America.”
The urban legend of Chinese restaurants serving dog, cat, and rat meat dates back to the beginning of Chinese immigration to the U.S. For example, an 1852 Mississippi newspaper editorial lamented that trade with China “is not as it ought to be,” and wrote, “And besides, the Chinaman still eats dog pie.”
While Chinese people may have been the first immigrant group to be widely described as “dog eaters,” the slur was soon directed at other Asian communities, said Robert Ku, author of “Questionable Gastronomy: Asian Food Politics in America.”
At the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, organizers reportedly forced indigenous Igorot people from the Philippines to slaughter and eat dogs for entertainment, perpetuating stereotypes about Filipinos. By the late 20th century, groups such as Koreans, Filipinos and Cambodians had been “stereotyped as primarily dog-eaters,” Khoo said.
More recently, in 2016, Oregon county commissioner and U.S. Senate candidate Faye Stewart accused Vietnamese refugees of “harvesting” dogs and cats for food, and last May, false claims that a Laotian and Thai restaurant in California served dog meat sparked months of harassment that ultimately forced the establishment to close.
The “Asian dog-eating” myth has persisted so long that public anger may have been less if Trump had targeted Asian immigrants instead of Haitians, Khoo said. “The fact that this slur was aimed at Haitians was in some way disconcerting to a lot of people,” Khoo said, “because, as far as I know, Haitians have never been stereotyped as dog eaters.”
Koo said slurs such as “dog eater” and “cat eater” have serious repercussions because animals such as dogs and cats are considered “honorable humans” in the U.S. By portraying immigrants as a danger to household pets, Trump is “effectively portraying them as perpetrators of the most cruel and heinous act humans are capable of – cannibalism,” he said.
Experts say the portrayal of Haitians as savage pet eaters could lead to increased racial violence. A bomb threat this week caused city hall and schools in Springfield to close. Republicans also rallied over the death of an 11-year-old boy who was killed when a bus crashed into a minivan driven by a Haitian immigrant, further demonizing the Haitian community. The boy’s father, Nathan Clark, called on Trump and Vance to stop using his son’s name for “political gain.”
“When you portray a group of people as barbaric or uncivilized, it becomes much easier to scapegoat them or pass harmful laws against them,” Ocampo said.