Less than half an hour into Tuesday’s presidential debate, former president Donald Trump deployed an updated version of a century-old slur against immigrant communities: that newcomers are eating other people’s pets and vermin.
“They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” Trump said about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. In the past four years, 15,000 Haitians have settled in the city of almost 60,000, most of whom through a legal resettlement program for migrants. “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”
Though city officials confirmed that they have received no such reports, and the baseless claim quickly drew condemnation, false claims about Haitians eating pets went viral on rightwing social media, and were quickly amplified by conservative lawmakers. The Ohio senator and vice-presidential candidate JD Vance wrote on X on Monday about reports of “Haitian illegal immigrants” abducting and eating pets and causing “general chaos” in Springfield.
People of Haitian descent say these xenophobic attacks are nothing new for their community, and experts say the “dog eater” trope is a fearmongering tactic white politicians have long deployed against immigrants of color, particularly those of Asian descent.
“The way white Americans have positioned themselves as culturally and morally superior, this is low-hanging fruit to rally xenophobia in a very quick way,” said Anthony Ocampo, a professor of sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.
Demonizing immigrants through falsehoods about their diet is a political tactic that originated in the late 19th century, during the height of anti-Chinese sentiment, said May-lee Chai, author and professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University.
Before the 1888 presidential election, Grover Cleveland’s campaign published trading cards that featured cartoonish sketches of Chinese men eating rats, and smeared his opponent, Benjamin Harrison, as “China’s presidential candidate”, according to the book Recollecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History.
“It’s a very old political trope to dehumanize Chinese male immigrants and show them as a threat to white American workers,” Chai said. Chinese workers posed not only a “labor threat” in the restaurant industry but also a “civilization threat”, she added, as one rationale for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was that Chinese immigration would contribute to the “browning of America”.
An urban legend alleging that Chinese restaurants serve dog meat, cat meat or rats dates back to the beginning of Chinese immigration to the US. An editorial from a Mississippi newspaper in 1852, for example, laments that trade with China is “not what it ought to be”, then says, “and besides, the Chinese still eat dog-pie”.
Chinese people may have been the first immigrant group to be widely profiled as “dog eaters”, but the slur was soon directed at other Asian communities, said Robert Ku, author of Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USA.
At the 1904 world’s fair in St. Louis, organizers reportedly forced the Indigenous Igorot people from the Philippines to butcher and eat dogs for entertainment – an event that cemented the stereotype against Filipinos. By the late 20th century, Ku said, groups including Koreans, Filipinos and Cambodians became “principally stereotyped as dog eaters”.
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More recently, in 2016, the Oregon county commissioner and US Senate hopeful Faye Stewart accused Vietnamese refugees of “harvesting“ dogs and cats for food. And last May, a false claim that a Laotian and Thai restaurant in California served dog meat caused months of harassment and eventual closure of the business.
The myth of the “dog-eating Asian” has persisted for so long, Ku said, that had Trump targeted Asian immigrants instead of Haitians, the public outrage may have been more muted. “The fact that the slur was directed at Haitians in some ways has confused a lot of people,” Ku said, “since Haitians, as far as I know, have never before been stereotyped as dog eaters.”
Since animals such as dogs and cats are considered “honorary humans” in the US, Ku said, a slur such as “dog eater” or “cat eater” carries serious ramifications. In presenting immigrants as a danger to household pets, he said, Trump was “in effect portraying immigrants as perpetrators of the most savage or heinous act that is humanly possible – cannibalism”.
The stereotyping of Haitians as savage pet eaters could lead to a rise in racial violence, experts say. In Springfield this week, bomb threats led to the closure of city hall and schools. Republicans have also rallied around the death of an 11-year-old boy – who was in a bus struck by a minivan driven by a Haitian immigrant – to further demonize the community. Nathan Clark, the boy’s father, asked Trump and Vance to stop using his son’s name for “political gain”.
“If you make it seem like a group is savage or uncivilized, it makes it a lot easier to scapegoat and enact harmful laws against [them],” Ocampo said.
