Oh No! I Accidentally Posted Something About Dogs and Cats Getting Eaten!

The Birth of An Occasional Advice Column

Serious analysis of semi-serious and occasionally dumb problems. Future editions will be for supporting readers, which you can become at any time.

The Quick Details

I generally have a few lanes that I stay in, and as a rule try to ignore whatever is on social media¹. And most of what I write is exploratory (to sort out what I think about something), or descriptive (to excavate what’s there, that others might enjoy it as well). Social media controversies, including politics, generally doesn’t fit into either of those.

That being said, there’s a great need for guidance on particular kinds of questions. Some of that I’m already doing, but not everything that we need sorting out is of the grave super heavy important variety. Some of it is of the ordinary kind of quandry kind that just needs some attention, even if the trivial stuff does lead to deeper kinds of questions.

So, welcome to a recurring feature:

We’ll begin with “So, You Participated in the Dog-Eating Migrant Story”.

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Much to the chagrin of pet owners everywhere, rumors and insinuations have been repeated from presidential debate stages and pundit mics that Hatian migrants in Ohio are killing dogs and cats for food. Now, the whole thing began because of a claim—and I kid you not—of a “neighbor’s daughter’s friend”, but it was built off a concern for the way that migration creates a strain on public resources.

That migration require additional resources from a host country is true². “Strain”, though, isn’t a bad thing, any more than “stress” is necessarily a bad thing: when something is stressed, it signals to the body that additional resources are needed to address the cause. It’s a morally neutral claim. But, we live in an age in which people are convinced that stress of all kinds are unhealthy, and so, unsurprisingly, anything that poses a “strain”—like unfamiliar neighbors—on existing configurations is seen negatively.

In the particular case of Springfield, Ohio, where this began—and where approximately 15,000 migrants were moved to a town of 60,000—one can see how infrastructural problems become stressed by an additional 25% of population. Enter the cat-thieving-and-eating rumor.

The problem with repeating a dumb claim appear in two ways:

1. Believing it as true. While it is certainly true that pets are not a universal presumption, and that cultures beyond the United States do in fact eat creatures which many Americans treat as pets, the probability of Haitian migrants stealing pets to eat is…..very low. The trope of a migrant population’s eating habits making them suspect, combined with the trope of migrants as thieves comes together here in a way which is not only doubly unbelievable, but doubly slanderous.³

So:

If you posted this with deep concern, the first obvious thing is to take it down, and acknowledge that you’ve born false witness. Pretty straightforward?

That you didn’t know that these kinds of stories repeat immigrant tropes that have been a part of immigrant stories since time immemorial? Understandable, but just know that’s a thing, and will continue to be a thing. I mean, there’s a reason that the book of Daniel goes out of its way to signify the kind of food that the Israelites eat as opposed to the Babylonians: it marks off what makes a people a people.

If you don’t want to eat what a community has on offer, feel free to get a Hot Pocket—I guarantee that it’s worse for you than a neighborhood duck.

2. Engaging with the story in a joking fashion. Stories live on not just by those repeating them, but by those repeating them negatively, and in a way which functions reactively. “You thought Hatians ate your cat? I would love it if Hatians ate my cat!” “You are scared of migrants? I love and welcome all migrants.” You get the idea. By mocking the original story, the story gets spread in a way which not only puts a seed of wonder in the ears of people who didn’t know about it, but also forces us into reactionary positions that are problems in different ways.

Exhibit A:

So:

Yes, mocking it makes you look cool and not-gullible and in on the joke. But you’re also spreading it around. Better to let foolishness collapse under its own weight. There’s a quasi-venerable tradition within Christianity of polemically mocking heretics and opponents of the faith, using rhetorical devices in a way which showcase the absurdity of theological position. But consider that these were used for serious things: save the big ammo for, say, the servants of Baal or for people defending papal indulgences.

If you marked yourself safe from having your dog eaten, repent of having taken foolishness seriously. Repent of having contributed to a vitriolic age. And beware that the seeds of reaction are taking root in your mind grapes. Our age is one in which the trivial exists right next to world catstrophes, with Very Trivial Things treated Very Seriously, with very little way to tell the difference⁴. The way out of this morass? Save mocking for the things worth mocking, and let dumb things drown under their own weight.

1. News, as Neil Postman put it, is so tied with entertainment. This makes it hard to what’s going on, without also being conditioned concerning a) why I should care about that thing, or b) why I should care about that thing even when it’s not entertaining.

2. It’s also true that migrants contribute more to the national economy than they use due to the payment of taxes in various forms through ordinary purchases, paying into social security they cannot access—the list goes on. For the complicated details of this particular question, see George Borjas’ excellent We Wanted Workers.

3. The initial post goes on to claim that ducks and geese were being eaten, which is….normal? My forebearers in Louisiana ate those animals, plus squirrels and the occasional possum. Assuming that our meat had to come from a factory farm is a pretty recent phenomenon.

4. Postman calls this the “And Now This” phenomenon, in which dumb stories appear interspersed with stories of grave importance in basically any news medium. Social media, with its infinite scroll, does this better than Postman could have ever dreamed of: announcements of birth, cancer, anime memes, and wedding pictures all jumble together in an incoherent morass which makes the important seem trivial by its placement.