When Nicolas Conquer, a French Donald Trump supporter, took to X on August 20 to decry the migration crisis in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, he did it à la Trump. "In Ceuta, they’re eating the cats,” Conquer posted.
Back in 2024, US President Donald Trump claimed that Haitian immigrants in the United States were eating people’s cats and dogs. Conquer’s accusations, however, are directed at the 2,000 to 5,000 migrants who stayed in Ceuta after a record number of 70,000 people crossed the border from Morocco in late July. The rumours have been gaining traction and, in recent days, growing numbers of French and Spanish social media users have been denouncing what they say is violence against the feline population in Ceuta.
The allegations were picked up by a number of Spanish media outlets, including the conservative site La Gaceta. On August 19, La Gaceta published an article claiming that “cats had been massacred and pigeons and seagulls devoured” in Ceuta after the “migrant invasion”. The main photo shows a dead white kitten near a rubbish bin.
The outlet also claimed to have spoken to the manager of an animal rescue organisation who had seen “many dead, mutilated cats”, some of them who had “half of their bodies amputated”.
Quickly, the photo of the dead white kitten was picked up and shared online, including by the local media outlet Ceuta Ahora, which has 130,000 Facebook followers. Another local site, la Verdad de Ceuta, published a photo of a dead orange-and-white...
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