What was claimed
A video shows “migrants” cooking a dog in public in Dublin.
Our verdict
The animal being roasted was a pig, not a dog, at a community event in Dublin.
Video does not show ‘migrants’ cooking a dog in Dublin
6 October 2023
Posts on social media claim a video shows “migrants” in Dublin cooking a dog, but this is not true. The animal being roasted was a pig.
The video shows several people at a spit roast outside a residential building. Text overlaid on the footage says: “wtf have the done to our country [sic].. this is a fucking dog being cooked on a bbq.. a fucking dog folks..”.
Multiple posts have the same caption, adding: “African migrants in Dublin roast a dog on a spit in public”.
One Facebook post says: “Don't know of [sic] they're actually migrants but I would doubt otherwise”, then goes on to claim: “African immigrants in Dublin capture a stray dog and roast it”. Another post refers to “migrants” more generally.
The video seems to have originally come from TikTok, although it no longer appears on the account shown in the watermark. It is still being shared on the platform, as well as on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter), where one post has over 217,000 views.
The video goes on to locate the footage at Dorset Street Flats in Dublin, which corresponds with an Instagram post sharing details about an event held there. The post shares several photos with the same background as the video, and clearly shows a pig is being roasted, not a dog.
The post refers to how “Irish culinary culture is slowly dying out” and the tradition of eating “pulled pork baps around a fire”. It says: “This is why, I want to bring a fine culinary once of event [sic], collaborating with chefs and butchers [...] a BBQ feeding all the homeless and all the refugees, and all the community”.
The person in the first photo, who is seemingly the account holder and organiser of the event, confirmed to fact checkers at Reuters that the animal being roasted in the video was a pig.
Misinformation like this is common on social media. Full Fact has written many times before about images and videos that have been miscaptioned, including a video supposedly showing Rishi Sunak’s staff celebrating a Hindu festival and a photo purportedly of Elon Musk as a child in apartheid-era South Africa.
It’s always a good idea to check the validity of pictures and images before reposting them. You can read more about how to tell whether a video is reliable in our guide here.
Image courtesy of David Dixon
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because photos show the animal being cooked was a pig, not a dog.