'In Ceuta, they are eating the cats': Fake images and a persistent rumour

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 cat. The image at left, posted on Instagram on August 19, 2026, by the Spanish site La Gaceta claims that the photo of a dead kitten next to a dumpster was taken in Ceuta. The image on the right shows the article published in Verdad de Ceuta about the cats that have supposedly been killed in Ceuta, featuring a dead orange-and-white cat. It turns out neither of these photos was taken in Ceuta.

No verifiable photo of a cat killed in Ceuta has been shared online so far 

It turns out, however, that both of these photos were taken in different parts of Spain last year – neither of them shows cats killed in Ceuta. Spanish fact-checking outlet Maldita investigated and showed that the photo of the white kitten was taken a year ago in the Canary Islands. When you run the image through a reverse image search (check out our handy guide to find out how), you can see the original photo published in a local media outlet that claimed cats were dying in suspicious circumstances. 

The photo of the orange-and-white cat was taken in October 2025 in Balaguer in Catalonia and was shared at the time by local media outlets.

Back in Ceuta, Agrevice Ceuta, a charity that takes care of feral cat populations, shared several Facebook posts warning people about the "false claims” about migrants murdering cats.  

In one post, shared on August 24, the charity “rejected the alarmist and unverified news that has been shared nationally” and said that they “hadn't lost a single cat out of the 500” in their care.  

Our team spoke to the president of the charity, Eduardo Sanchez, on August 25. He said he hadn't seen or heard about any violence against cats: 

"Since the start of the [migrant] crisis, we've been in the streets constantly to monitor the feral cats under our care.  We've also been providing food and water to other feral cats in different areas.”

"I am in constant contact with the municipal workers who deal with dead animals: no one told me about finding a dead cat, let alone one that has been beaten or skinned [since late July].” 

'False' rumours 

Our team spoke to the local branch of the Unified Association of the Civil Guard, the largest organisation that represents the Spanish Civil Guard. They also denounced what they called “false” rumours. To date, no authentic photos of dead or mistreated cats in Ceuta have been circulated online. 

Spanish media outlet La Gaceta, which had originally posted the photo of the dead white kitten (which, it turned out, had been taken in the Canaries a year earlier), replaced the image with four images of dead birds. One of the photos shows a dead pigeon with no signs of violence, while the other three images show the same dead pigeon that does seem to be missing feathers and appears partially mutilated. 

Our team spoke to the journalist at La Gaceta who wrote this article. He said that local sources had told him that they had found “dead seagulls – some of whom had been partially eaten – because a lot of the people who came to Ceuta don't have anything to eat and are hungry.”

Our team was not able to verify these claims. The author of the article did not respond to our request to see photos or videos of mistreated cats, nor our request to be put in contact with the sources who had reported this. 

Another photo, generated by AI 

In recent days, another photo – this one said to show a migrant mistreating a cat – was shared by a number of social media users. It turns out that the image is one that was modified using artificial intelligence. Spanish fact-checking outlet Maldita reported that the original image comes from a video flmed in Ceuta by the Spanish media outlet El Pais.

The image has a watermark that says "SynthID", which is like an invisible tattoo that shows if the image was modified or generated by AI. The watermark, originally developed by Google, has also been adopted by AI companies like OpenAI (check out their tool for detecting AI here) so that you can detect AI-generated images.  At left is a screengrab from a video posted by Spanish media outlet El Pais, which shows a migrant in Ceuta with a stick in his hand. At right is the AI-generated image, which has swapped out the stick for a cat. The AI-detection tool developed by Open AI determined this image was indeed AI-generated.

The feral cats living in Ceuta have been affected by the sudden arrival of several thousand people in the enclave, which could also lead to the temporary disappearance of animals displaced from their natural habitat, Sanchez told our team.

At the time of publication, our team had identified no verifiable link between the death or disappearance of cats and the recent arrival of migrants in Ceuta. 

"If tomorrow, we found a cat with its head ripped off, we'd be talking about it, too,” said Sanchez.

This article has been translated from the original in French by Brenna Daldorph.