In this blog post I will be analyzing the claim that Haitian immigrants are taking and eating Springfield, Ohio residents’ pets. This claim first started spreading on platforms such as X and Facebook, with a couple viral posts talking about Haitian immigrants in Springfield terrifying the residents with their reported actions. The claim reached its highest exposure when Donald Trump brought up the claim in his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, stating illegal immigrants in Springfield are “eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people who live there”.

After learning that one of the initial posts was posted to Facebook, I did a Google search with key words such as “Facebook post Haitian pets” to try and find the original post. After finding a Fact Check site with information about the claim, I found in their article an archive of what appears to be one of the original Facebook posts. In the Facebook post made by “The New American Magazine”, it claims that “Haitian Biden migrants” are eating the city’s ducks, stealing pets and eating them, and even doing things like crashing into school buses and killing children. The photo attached to the post shows a man carrying what looks to be a bird, but it is somewhat hard to tell the state or legitimacy of it. In the top left corner of the photo, it gives a photo source of “Independent MAGA News/Facebook”. I decided to check the Facebook page to gauge the accuracy of their general posts, and the page predominately posts memes and articles from websites such as Breitbart, which is a far-right leaning website that is often criticized for posting misinformation and attacking oppositional journalism with recontextualized media.

After doing more research with the SIFT method, or Stop, Investigate, Find, and Trace on the image of the man with a bird, I found that the image came from an unrelated Reddit post. Posted in a Columbus subreddit, the image just showed a man carrying what was identified as a goose, and the title of the post says, “Things you see while driving in CBUS”. There was no mention of the man being a Haitian immigrant, nor was it taken in Springfield, the location that was said to be the place that the incidents have been occurring. In an article with The Columbus Dispatch, the man who posted the photo to Reddit stated that he regrets sharing it, as he does not like that it has been used against any groups to support the claim which he also believes is false. Overall, it is not known whether the man in the photo was Haitian, why he had the goose, the goose was not a pet, and it is known that the photo was taken around 40 miles away from Springfield in Columbus, Ohio.

Another viral post that has been used to attempt to validate the claims is a video that I have been seeing on X, showing a woman being arrested for killing and potentially, according to others in the video, eating a cat. In an X post I found while attempting to trace the claims back to their source, the poster states that “Immigrants in America are stealing, sacrificing and eating neighborhood pets like dogs, cats, ducks and geese. This Haitian immigrant woman was arrested for eating her neighbor’s pet cat.”. When investigating the claims by researching the information I had about the case, I found that the person getting arrested in the video is a woman from Ohio named Alexis Ferrell. She was in fact caught killing the cat, however she was not a Haitian migrant, and she did not live anywhere close to Springfield. The incident occurred outside Canton, Ohio, which is 172 miles from Springfield. Despite the case being gruesome and concerning, it is important to be aware that using her case as evidence that Haitian immigrants are doing the same thing in a different city is harmful and dehumanizing.

The city manager of Springfield, Bryan Heck, has also stated that there have been “no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”. The moderators of the debate between Trump and Harris also brought up Heck’s statement after Trump made the claim in an effort to fact check.

Using both lateral reading and the SIFT method to research the claim that Haitians immigrants are killing and eating pets in Springfield, I found no credible evidence to find the claim true. The claim has not been confirmed by a credible source, the context in the viral posts debunks the claim, and the claim has been debunked by city officials.

(example of my lateral reading)