Does a viral video capture "Bosnian neighbors" roasting a dog in their backyard in the U.S.? No, that's not true: A Cornell University professor of veterinary medicine told Lead Stories that what is seen in the years-old footage does not show dog or even carnivore anatomy, speculating it could be a lamb or a goat. The video recycled an old anti-immigrant trope targeting Bosnian refugees in the U.S. An international group specializing in stopping the consumption of dog meat told Lead Stories that its experts are not aware of "any cases of dog consumption in Bosnia or among Bosnians in America."
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X, formerly known as Twitter, on September 14, 2024. It said:
Uncovered: Man Catches His BOSNIAN Neighbors Cooking Dog, At The End He Says His Cat Is MISSING.
This is what the claim looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Mon Sep 16 15:12:23 2024 UTC)
The 48-second video showed what looked like an animal carcass being rotated on a spit at some unidentifiable location. There were no geographical references or sound bites indicating ethnic Bosnian populations in the United States.
When asked by Lead Stories what kind of animal carcass the video shows, Timothy Hackett (archived here), chairman of the Department of Clinical Sciences at Cornell University's College of Veterinary Medicine, said via email on September 17, 2024:
Lamb.
Answering a follow-up question via email on the same day, Hackett, who also teaches emergency and critical care veterinary medicine, continued:
It's not a dog. It is an ungulate based on the nose and upper and lower jaw and the herbivorous teeth. It has large eye sockets on the side of head (prey animals) and not in the front (carnivores). The tail looks more like that of a young sheep (lamb) than a goat, but it could be a goat.
The Humane Society International (archived here), which promotes animal welfare, has no information about Bosnians in the U.S. eating dogs. Anna West (archived here), the nonprofit's senior director of media relations, told Lead Stories via email on September 17, 2024:
Our experts, including the director of our End Dog Meat campaign, are not aware of any cases of dog consumption in Bosnia or among Bosnians in America.
Using keywords from the claim on X, Lead Stories searched Google News for corroboration of the claim, but found no such reports. The results of that search can be seen here (archived here).
Bosnia and Herzegovina (archived here) is a majority-Muslim southeastern European state, formerly part of Yugoslavia, that borders the Adriatic Sea and Croatia. Between 1992 and 2007, thousands of refugees (archived here) from Bosnia and Herzegovina fled to the U.S. to escape brutal fighting over the breakup of Yugoslavia and the aftermath of those conflicts.
Meat -- especially spit-grilled BBQ -- is a significant part of Bosnian cuisine. "Typical Bosnian meat dishes" include lamb, according to page 65 of a 2022 article about Bosnian "food identity" in the European Journal of Tourism, Hospitality and Recreation, a scholarly publication.
Rumors about Bosnian immigrants in the U.S. eating dogs appeared in the 1990s, Anna Crosslin, president of the International Institute, an organization that helped newcomers adapt to life in the U.S., told The New York Times (archived here) in 2011. Crosslin expressed a sense of bewilderment over the rumors, which were as if, she said, people had "never seen a lamb."
In mid-September 2024, with immigration a presidential campaign topic, the claim resurfaced in the U.S. During the September 10, 2024, debate, former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, repeated the allegations about purported dog-and-cat eating in Haitian immigrant communities in Ohio.
Local authorities refuted that (archived here). Lead Stories debunked subsequent claims on social media here.
The video that is the focus of this fact check wasn't even recent. A Microsoft Bing reverse image search (archived here) revealed that the video predated the 2024 debate between Trump and his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, by more than eight years (a screenshot of the now-deleted original video is saved here). The video's original caption said nothing about Bosnian populations in the U.S.:
(Source: Microsoft Bing screenshot taken on Mon Sep 16 18:54:45 2024 UTC)
Other Lead Stories fact checks related to the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign can be read here.
