As a student, I supported myself by working shifts monitoring burglar alarms. I came home every night smelling of the cigarettes my co-workers smoked in the kitchen because we had limited exterior ventilation. I used to worry a lot about passive smoking.
These days, I worry about passive TikTok. I vicariously consume TikTok through other people, some of whom I love (and who claim to love me). This week, that’s meant passive exposure to viral musical pieces set against Donald Trump’s bonkers claim that “they’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” You haven’t heard this? Go on, I dare you.
In case you really have been bush for the past couple of weeks, Trump and his running mate JD Vance have spread baseless claims that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, have been stealing and eating people’s pets and local geese. I write this on the day the original complainant to the police revealed that Miss Sassy was actually just Miss-ing and was subsequently found, uneaten, in the basement. Bonkers, bonkers, bonkers.
Amazingly, or perhaps just sadly, claims that foreigners eat pets are not new. My Encyclopedia of Urban Legends tells me there are quite a few variations on this theme. One variant relates to rumours of finding cat bones, or a name tag, in food served at (usually) “Chinese” restaurants. “Chinese” seems to be a fairly generic alternative to “foreign”, and targeted restaurants can be Vietnamese, or Cambodian, but also Eastern European.
These stories are often supported by off-the-record claims that cats and dogs are plentiful, so why not use them?
‘Eating Pets’ has a long track record. The earliest claims date back to the late 1980s, presented as ‘facts’ by slightly dodgy news outlets.
On the record, however, it’s pretty uncommon for folk to eat cats and dogs in their native countries, so why do it here? Importantly, when investigated, most of these claims provide no evidence that any pets were harmed in the perpetration of the relevant cuisine.
“Eating Pets” has a long track record. The earliest claims I can find date back to the late 1980s, presented as “facts” by slightly dodgy news outlets, almost always focusing on refugee communities.
Why? Sociologists have spent a lot more time than psychological researchers looking at urban myths, and one argument is that these myths reflect our modern fears. I have done a little research on this.
If we look at how many people believe there are alligators living in the New York sewers (a quarter of us say this is true), that St Bernards are exported to China to be used as table meat (yes, there really is a myth about this), that cackling evildoers put razor blades in Halloween candy, or that a hook-handed man will kill you if you’re a horny teen hanging out at lover’s lane, we find they boil down into a smaller set of “families” of urban myths.
The main ones reflect different types of moral panic. There’s a family of myths that revolve around food – that some fast-food chains use food made from petroleum byproducts or recycled chicken fat, or drug dealers peddle cannabis laced with poison. These reflect a worry about “contamination of our bodily envelope” by the things we put into our bodies but don’t see the origins of.
I put things like cellphones causing cancer, and wind farms making people sick in a similar boat – they’re about our anxiety due to rapid technological change.
Migrant-related myths, however, relate to our anxiety about the unknown other. It’s no coincidence that the 1970s and 80s saw influxes of refugees into Western nations and a lot of angst over these people who looked and sounded different. If someone looks or sounds different, can we trust them? I can’t find Miss Sassy, and those folk next door look a bit suspicious … I understand that, but what I can’t abide is the weaponisation of these debunked stories to make political hay.
