Spin Control: Pet-eating urban legend has been around for decades, even in Spokane

Tuesday’s presidential debate may have elevated to new heights an urban legend that some people somewhere are eating your pets.

In this case, it was a claim that Haitian immigrants in an Ohio town were catching and eating cats and dogs. At least according to former President Donald Trump, who said he was repeating something he’d seen on television.

To some it sounded fanciful, particularly after one of the moderators said local officials in the town had no such reports of anything of the sort.

To me, however, it sounded eerily familiar, albeit with a change in immigrant groups.

Growing up, the story that Chinese restaurants used dogs or cats as their source for chop suey or chow mein made the rounds about as frequently as the story that some kid was bitten by a rattlesnake while riding on the Ferris Wheel or some other carnival ride. Neither, of course, were true but that didn’t keep kids from telling them.

Coming to Spokane in 1981, I encountered an updated version of the pet-eating slander with new victims: the recent Vietnamese or Hmong immigrants who had escaped Southeast Asia after the United States pulled out of its disastrous war there.

It had two versions. Either they were capturing dogs and cats in their neighborhoods, or making repeated trips to the animal shelters to adopt abandoned animals that would not become pets, but dinner.

As the newest reporter who routinely got the worst assignments, I was told to check it out.

There was nothing to it. No such reports to police, no neighborhoods with a huge increase in missing pet posters on utility poles, no incidence of repeat “adopters” at the shelters.

Over the years, particularly since the advent of the Internet, I’ve seen similar versions of this urban legend pop up around the country. It’s almost always tied to a new or disfavored group of people. It never checks out.

While helping to spread these stories, the Internet also can help knock them down. Snopes.com, which debunks urban legends, lists multiple instances cropping up since the 1990s.

Such stories are not unique to America and not particularly new. Some are even darker.

Visiting Poland a few years ago, we happened to tour the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, which, among other things, traces the history of bigotry in Eastern Europe. As far back as the Middle Ages, rumors would circulate among the Christians that Jews were stealing children, murdering them and using their blood for secret religious rituals. Known as “blood libel,” it would prompt mob violence against the Jews.

But, you might say, that was the Middle Ages. Things like that don’t happen in modern times. And you’d be only partly right, because during that same trip, we happened to take a tour of Auschwitz, and it’s pretty easy to draw a straight line from the anti-Semitism of the pogroms to the Holocaust.

This is not to suggest that some flaky media posts featuring third-hand rumors about pets being eaten in an Ohio town is on par with the Final Solution. It’s just a suggestion that when you start believing bad but untrue things about people who are different from you, there’s no upside and quite a bit of downside.

Online ethical dilemmas

Washington has very strict laws that govern a legislator’s website during campaign season if that lawmaker is seeking re-election. From the beginning of filing week in May until the election results are certified in early December, a legislator’s website can’t have anything added or deleted. It’s designed to keep lawmakers or their staffs from campaigning on the state-funded website.

The Legislative Ethics Board, which oversees the enforcement of those rules, is being asked to consider what some might view as a reasonable amendment. If the website lists the lawmaker’s staff name, phone number and email address, and that staffer leaves after the campaign starts, would it be OK to take that information off the website? In some cases, the staff member’s email address is discontinued, so a message from the constituent will just bounce back.

The board already has an exception that allows the website to remove the address of a lawmaker’s district office if that is closed during the campaign, to save people from wasting a trip. Expanding the exception, however, will likely wait until the 2025 campaign season.

“The language of the statute is inflexible,” said Sen. Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle, a member of the board. The changes aren’t so urgent that they can’t wait for an update of the law next year.

Campaigning is also forbidden on social media accounts maintained by legislative staff. That can create a problem when replies or comments show up supporting or opposing candidates or ballot measures. But legislative staff are seeking guidance from the board on what constitutes campaign speech.

Saying to vote for or against someone is clearly not allowed, but how about statements like “Democrats are bad, vote red,” or “Republicans are bad, vote blue”? And how far back would they have to go to delete or block such comments – if that’s even possible – and how much of their limited resources they should devote to it?