Professor Merrill Kaplan is the director of Ohio State University’s Center for Folklore Studies. She studies and teaches about the role of rumor, legend, folk belief, and superstition in society.
Springfield City Hall received a bomb threat a day ago.
It was presumably related to the rumor that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s cats and dogs in that city.
City leaders and the media are debunking the pet-eating rumor but are not describing as a longstanding legend, i.e., folklore.
The original Facebook post describes hearing the story from a neighbor’s daughter’s friend, the sort of friend-of-a-friend attribution typical of unfounded rumor.
John Legend:‘Nobody’s eating cats. Nobody’s eating dogs.’ Haitian immigrants deserve grace
The pet-eating rumor is just the latest iteration of a legend that has long attached to assorted immigrant groups in the US. In the 1890s, recent German immigrants were accused of using people’s pets for sausages, as a popular folk song of the day attests:
“There was a little Dutchman, his name was Johnny BarbeckHe made the finest sausages and sauerkraut and speck Until one day he invented the sausage making machineNow all the neighbors’ cats and dogs will never more be seen.
Oh Mister Johnny Barbeck, how could you be so mean?I told you you’d be sorry for inventing that machineNow all the neighbors’ cats and dogs will never more be seen –They’ve all been ground to sausages in Johnny Barbeck’s machine!“
What does this have to do with hot dogs?
A quick Google search reveals widespread knowledge of versions of this folk song, often remembered from summer camp. The boy’s identification as Dutch is a misunderstanding of Deutsch — the German word for German — just as the Pennsylvania Dutch are in fact German in origin.
It is possible that the term “hot dog” derives from such rumors.
Hot dogs, i.e., frankfurter sausages, are also German in origin, introduced by the same immigrant population that was rumored to eat dogs and cats. The earliest references to “hot dog sandwiches” are in student publications and they may reflect humorous student slang of the day.
Asians immigrants have been attached to hateful pet-eating rumor
The core of this legend was updated in later decades to attach to other groups.
In the 1980s, Asian immigrants (Chinese, Vietnamese, Hmong) were accused of stealing and eating pets in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, documented by folklorist Roger Mitchell in the 1987 Midwestern Journal of Language and Folklore piece “The Will to Believe and Anti-Refugee Rumors” (freely available online through Hathi Trust here).
This rumor has been attached to Chinese immigrants to the U.S. since the late 19th century.
As students in OSU’s Introduction to Folklore classes frequently learn to their own surprise, some knowledge of tradition may reveal that today’s hateful rumor was once applied to one’s own immigrant ancestors.
Professor Merrill Kaplan is the director of Ohio State University’s Center for Folklore Studies. She studies and teaches about the role of rumor, legend, folk belief, and superstition in society.
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