Reports have spread across the media and social media of Haitian migrants eating people’s pets and local wildlife in Springfield, Ohio. While some mainstream outlets claim the reports are false, such cases are not uncommon worldwide.
Migrants who come to the West are often taken care of by local governments and NGOs and are rarely in a position where they need to resort to eating local wildlife or pets to survive.
However, in 2010, a group of Eastern European migrants in the British city of Peterborough were caught trapping and eating local swans, roasting them over fires on the banks of the River Nene. Swans are legally protected animals in Britain and are the property of the reigning monarch.
Experts and the media initially denied reports of the swan killings, but investigations revealed that migrants were killing and eating the birds.
A similar case was reported in New York in 2015 when three refugees from Myanmar, formerly Burma, were arrested for killing and eating a swan.
Elsewhere in Europe, there have been numerous reports of migrants engaging in cruelty to animals, including Muslims slaughtering sheep in parking lots or bathtubs. Some countries, like Sweden, have admitted animal cruelty is much more prevalent in migrant-dense areas.
GLOBAL ISSUE?
Elsewhere in the world, similar reports have emerged. In Taiwan, several Vietnamese migrants were fined around $33,000 in 2020 for killing and eating a local dog and served jail sentences of 30 to 40 days each. Authorities rescued three other dogs they assumed were also being kept to be eaten later on.
Chinese workers in the Middle Eastern state of Jordan were likewise accused of killing and eating street dogs in 2019, with the NGO Network for Animals claiming it represented a rising trend in the torture and killing of dogs in the region.
