Eating cats and dogs lie has long history

I've been watching televised debates between presidential candidates since Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy in 1960.

But I never thought I'd hear a candidate claim that people were eating cats and dogs in an American city.

But there was former President Donald Trump saying, "In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They're eating — they are eating the pets of the people that live there."

Of course, it wasn't true.

But since then, there have been more than 30 bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio, including at elementary schools.

And some of those threats came from other countries.

So far, all have been hoaxes.

But people there are on edge.

When I heard that, it triggered a memory.

Back in the '80s, the Messenger-Inquirer got several calls about an Asian restaurant in town.

Dogs and cats in the neighborhood were disappearing, they said.

They insisted that the restaurant was cooking and serving them.

We checked, found that there was nothing to it and didn't write about it.

But there it was.

Prejudice against people who look different, speak different.

People we don't know.

In Ohio, it was Haitians who were the targets.

Springfield has between 12,000 and 15,000 Haitians in a population of 58,000.

So, there are bound to be growing pains.

Erik Crew, a staff attorney with the immigrant advocacy organization Haitian Bridge Alliance, told USA Today, "These kind of anti-Black propaganda narratives that the 'savages are coming to destroy and eat your family' are really part of the same playbook that goes back hundreds of years."

Scott Kurashige, an historian of race and Asian American history, told USA Today that by 1883, the dogs and cats being eaten by Asians story had become so common that Chinese-American journalist Wong Chin Foo offered a $500 reward — worth about $14,000 today — to anyone who could prove that Chinese people were eating rats or cats.

It was never claimed.

Folks, we have enough important issues today that we don't need divisive fake issues like this.