When Donald Trump shocks the world with the prospect that dogs and cats are being butchered and eaten somewhere in the U.S., he is not only othering the imagined group of people doing it; he is also ignoring the fact that North Americans butcher and eat more than 27 million animals every single day.Piroschka Van De Wouw/Reuters
Jessica Scott-Reid is a journalist and animal advocate, and a regular contributor to Sentient.
It was the slur heard around the world. During the U.S. presidential debate on Tuesday, former president Donald Trump made the effectively debunked claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing dogs and cats, killing them, and consuming them. “They’re eating the pets!” he exclaimed. In doing so, Mr. Trump was repeating an unsubstantiated story that had spread in the small town and was now being amplified in the national discourse through Mr. Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance.
The allegation was shocking and meme-inducing. But the concept, unfortunately, was far from new.
The “dog-eating foreigner” trope has been around for at least a century. Deeply rooted in racism, it has been catapulted by colonialism and continually fed by the fears of “others” infiltrating our homes. “I have heard the immigrants-come-to-town-and-eat-pets racist trope ever since I was a child,” wrote May-Lee Chai, a creative-writing professor at San Francisco State University, on X. “This is very old racism.”
As it continues today, the claim perpetuates stereotypes that add to a dangerous landscape in both the U.S. and Canada, where politics are dividing us more and more. “It’s a rhetorical tool meant to delegitimize the humanity of the group suffering the accusation, to establish the barbarism and savagery of their supposedly uncivilized nature,” says Christopher Sebastian, an adjunct lecturer in journalism and media studies at Anglo-American University.
It’s also blatantly hypocritical, and highlights the undeniable interconnectedness of racism and speciesism.
Speciesism is a concept first coined by English psychologist Richard D. Ryder in 1970, and is based on the assumption that humans are superior to other non-human animals. Like racism, speciesism devalues certain groups based on perceived differences and reflects the systemic oppression and exploitation of those “others,” relying on arbitrary criteria to justify unequal treatment. Speciesism places the value of humans above animals, as well as the value of certain animals – such as pets – over that of others, such as animals farmed for food and clothing, tested on for research, considered pests, etc. When the mistreatment of those categories of animals becomes normalized by a society – say, through factory farming, animal testing and use in entertainment – it further desensitizes the population to the suffering of certain communities of people.
When Mr. Trump shocks the world with the prospect that dogs and cats are being butchered and eaten somewhere in the U.S., he is not only othering the imagined group of people doing it; he is also ignoring the fact that North Americans butcher and eat more than 27 million animals every single day. Inherently categorizing a dog as worthy of protection from slaughter and consumption, and a pig as unworthy, is an example of the same kinds of arbitrary criteria that also allow racism to thrive. As Prof. Sebastian explains, the dog-eating trope further serves to “re-establish the purity and respectability of whiteness and white American identity,” which only allows for the eating of some animals, while the eating of others is considered immoral, savage and unclean.
To work through why Mr. Trump was swayed to believe the claim he “saw on TV” – enough so to spew it on one of the biggest platforms on Earth – we need only to consider how easy it was for him, how familiar. The Republican nominee already has a history of referring to immigrants as animals, doing so most recently during a speech in Michigan just this past April.
“When you compare immigrants to animals and say that they aren’t human, that’s the definition of dehumanizing,” explains Seth Millstein, an American journalist who covers politics and food systems for Sentient. “But it’s also insulting and disparaging animals too, because you’re implying that a group of people are worse because they are more like animals, which is the definition of speciesism. So that dehumanization, racism and speciesism go hand-in-hand and reinforce one another in Trump’s comments.”
The inflammatory rhetoric wielded by Mr. Trump, about immigrants and slaughtered pets, reveals more than just ignorance; it underscores a deep-seated hypocrisy intertwined with systemic racism and speciesism. By decrying the imagined slaughter of dogs and cats while ignoring the routine gassing, shooting, electrocuting and stabbing of billions of other animals each year, he and others like him perpetuate a dangerous hierarchy that devalues both people and animals. The intersection of prejudices that the man running for the highest office in the world put on full display serves to maintain a divisive and unequal societal structure – and reinforces the urgent need to confront and dismantle both racism and speciesism.