The Deep History of Racism and Speciesism Behind ‘They’re Eating the Dogs’

It was a moment in history that overshadowed the rest of the night. As we all know by now, during the recent 2024 U.S. presidential debate, Republican nominee Donald Trump claimed that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating pets, namely dogs and cats. The moment went viral, becoming arguably the most talked about soundbite of the evening. But even as headlines proliferated and Haitian communities in Ohio received countless threats — Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance doubled down, appearing on talk shows to repeat the already-debunked claim.

But why did this clear misinformation take such a strong hold of news cycle and social media threads? The answer lies in a deep history of racism, and a legacy of using animals and food as a means to create and maintain social divisions and hierarchies.

Speciesism and Moral Foods

In many Western cultures, companion animals such as dogs and cats are typically seen as family members; eating them is viewed as abhorrent. Conversely, the consumption of other animals — cows, pigs, chickens — occurs en-masse and goes largely unquestioned.

This division of some animals as acceptable for consumption and others as unfit, immoral or even unclean, reflects both racist and speciesist hierarchies in our society. Speciesism is generally defined as discrimination or prejudice against individuals based on their species, supporting the belief that humans are superior to other animals, and that some animals are more worthy of protection from harm than others. This prejudice is generally based on arbitrary criteria – not unlike racism.

The Roots of the Pet-Eating Trope

The practice of condemning non-white people for eating foods that are deemed by the majority of Western society as culturally inappropriate is nothing new. Dating back at least as far as colonialism, today’s racist pet-eating misinformation is rooted in narratives that position racially and ethnically marginalized communities as inferior and immoral.

Today, the idea that immigrants, particularly those from non-Western backgrounds, consume companion animals is not merely a cultural misunderstanding — it is a narrative deployed to dehumanize and marginalize those communities. It is deeply rooted in both racist and speciesist histories, and continues to reveal underlying prejudices that have long shaped societal attitudes towards both people and animals.

To better understand the trope’s origins and implications, we can trace our way through the history, beginning with Indigenous histories, through the blight of American slavery to stereotypes of Asian immigrants — and the speciesist narratives throughout.

Colonization and Indigenous Food Deemed Uncivilized

Europeans encountered a variety of Indigenous cultures across the Americas during early periods of colonization, perceiving Indigenous practices through a lens of cultural superiority and ethnocentrism. Indigenous food practices (which often included growing and gathering plant foods and hunting and trapping wild animals), for example, were frequently considered inferior. Colonizers viewed their own food practices, on the other hand, as the standard of civilization.

“Herein began the colonial discourse of ‘right foods’ (superior European foods) vs. ‘wrong foods’ (inferior Indigenous foods),” writes Dr. Linda Alvarez for Food Empowerment Project.

Many Indigenous groups across North America were known to eat foods such as maize, beans, squash and wild rice, as well as hunt wild animals like bison, and trap others such as beavers. Europeans however, preferred the taste of cows, and considered plant foods “famine foods.”

As a result, bison populations were devastated, between 1820 to 1880, going from millions to under 1,000. “Farmers saw [bison] as little more than a species in the way of their plans to operate massive cattle farms,” writes Shawna Gray for Sentient. “Together with the government, ranchers followed a violent policy of decimating bison populations — both to push Indigenous peoples onto reserves and free up land for cattle farming.”

The framing of Indigenous dietary practices as primitive and uncivilized allowed colonizers to devalue and control Indigenous people, as well as the lands and animals, paving the way for their own economic and territorial gains. This demonization was not simply a matter of cultural difference, but a strategic means to undermine Indigenous cultures and to reinforce European ideals, including introducing what would become our modern and industrialized food system of factory farming.

Slavery and Racialized Eating

The enslavement of Africans in the U.S. introduced another layer of prejudice intertwined with speciesist and racist stereotypes, as enslaved peoples faced derogatory judgments about their dietary habits. As Booker T. Washington once wrote of his time being enslaved, his family received their meals like “dumb animals get theirs. It was a piece of bread here and a scrap of meat there.”

Enslaved people often had to sustain themselves on these scraps of meat, which, according to Atlas Obscura, “they transformed into savory, satisfying dishes — from their enslavers’ butchered livestock. One such piece of offal was chitlins, or pig intestines.”

But “without thorough cleaning before cooking, chitterlings produce a horrible smell,” writes Shaylah Brown in Slavery, soul food and the power of Black women. “Because slaveholders thought slaves were inferior, enslaved people were given the parts of the animal that no one else wanted to eat.”

Sometimes this wasn’t enough. According to archeological findings, some enslaved populations supplemented their rations of pork and beef by trapping and eating small animals, such as raccoons, turtles, rabbits and ducks, as well as oysters, fish, blackberries and grapes.

This way of eating was often used as evidence of the supposed inferiority of enslaved peoples, according to a 2016 University of Wisconsin-Madison dissertation, and to further portray their traditions as unrefined compared to European standards.

Decades after slavery was no longer legal in the U.S., the narrative of characterizing anyone who was not white as a lesser species was still firmly embedded in the public consciousness. Racialized discourses around food only further served to validate and perpetuate these harsh realities of slavery, and the continued racial discrimination and speciesism we see plaguing the U.S. today.

Asian Immigration and Xenophobic Bias

“I have heard the immigrants-come-to-town-and-eat-pets racist trope ever since I was a child,” writes May-Lee Chai, a creative writing professor at San Francisco State University, recently on X. “This is very old racism.” The trope stems in-part from the fact that in some cultures, eating dogs remains legal and practiced in certain regions. That said, while some countries, for example South Korea, are more commonly associated with eating dogs, the statistics don’t reflect that. Survey data from 2020 found that 83.9 percent of South Koreans either have never consumed dog meat, or wouldn’t in the future.

Nonetheless, the stigma associated with eating dogs, due to it being deemed culturally inappropriate in the West, has been attributed, without basis in fact, to a wide range of Asian immigrant communities.

Asian immigrants began arriving in the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, encountering significant hostility, as Asian cultures were stereotyped and feared as “exotic,” “barbaric,” and “menacing.” The trope of Asian immigrants eating pets is rooted in these Western colonial attitudes, which view certain cuisines as inherently savage, perpetuating the idea that “you’re engaging in something that is not just a matter of taste, but a violation of what it is to be human,” Paul Freedman, a professor of history at Yale University, recently told the Associated Press.

The goal in spreading such stereotypes, Anita Mannur, director of American University’s Asia, Pacific and Diaspora Studies program and other experts told The Washington Post, “is to portray newcomers as unfit for American society or invoke disgust toward them.” And one of the ways to “vilify Asian Americans” Mannur said, “was to cast them as ‘other’ through these imagined eating habits: that they were supposedly eaters of cats or dogs or rats.”

The Bottom Line

As the echoes of the 2024 U.S. presidential debate slowly fade (or don’t), the viral claim that immigrants are consuming pets exposes more than just a moment of TV sensationalism; it unveils a persistent narrative rooted in centuries of racism and speciesism. This trope is so woven into the fabric of American history that it serves as a stark reminder of how easily misinformation can take hold, especially when it feeds into existing stereotypes and prejudices.