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| - A rumor circulating online in January 2025 claimed Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had started his own dog meat farm in Hawaii.
Many of the users promoting the rumor shared a Jan. 19 post (archived) from the Elwood's Organic Dog Meat Facebook page, featuring a set of four images. The images showed a purported Facebook post from Zuckerberg in which he announced his dog-meat company, a photo of Zuckerberg preparing to eat red meat, a picture of a dog wearing a Hawaiian lei and a close-up photo of plated red meat.
The Facebook post for Elwood's Organic Dog Meat displayed these pictures as one image.
The Elwood's post began: "Zuckerberg has started his own dog meat farm in Hawaii! This Elwood-sourced dog meat ranch provides work for local folks & is vertically integrated (a fancy tech word for 💯 ethical). 🥰 We can find the negative about anyone---or we can focus on the positive. Farming dogs for meat is definitely a positive story. Consider a whole Elwood's Rottie for a winter luau? 15% off macadamia-finished Lab & Rottie steaks. Use code ZUCK." The post then linked to elwooddogmeat.com.
However, this rumor was not true. The managers of the social media pages and website associated with Elwood's Organic Dog Meat labeled their content as satire.
Elwood's does not actually sell dog meat. Rather, the owners of elwooddogmeat.com wrote that they use the outrage resulting from the idea of selling dog meat in an effort to promote a message of vegan activism. For example, we emailed Elwood's with questions for this story. We received an automatic response reading, in part:
Elwood's Organic Dog Meat isn't real. Our site is meant to provoke emotions, so if you're feeling anger or discomfort — it's totally normal. Most people don't want to think about this at all. But consider what it'd mean to open your heart to the idea that so-called "food animals"are just as worthy of love and kindness as dogs — and maybe that there is no such thing as an "animal meant for food."
Molly Elwood, the cofounder and CEO of Elwood's Organic Dog Meat, continued their satirical story in a reply we received after publishing this story. Elwood said, in part, "As a small, local, second-generation family farm, we are proud to be helping Mark plant his first pug bacon seeds in Hawaii." She also added, "We are pleased to be fostering this experience for Mark and his family."
The fictional story about Zuckerberg and dog meat spread after the publishing of a video on Jan. 7 in which he announced the end of Meta's U.S. third-party fact-checking program and the institution of changes to its hateful-conduct policies. The Elwood's Facebook post displayed the hashtags "#factcheckthis" and "#meta." The story also spread around the same time when Zuckerberg and other tech billionaires attended U.S. President Donald Trump's inauguration in Washington on Jan. 20.
In the creation of the Elwood's post, its owners selected elements — including the photo of Zuckerberg seated at a table and preparing to eat — from one of his genuine Instagram posts (archived) from Jan. 9, reading in part, "Started raising cattle at Ko'olau Ranch on Kauai, and my goal is to create some of the highest quality beef in the world. The cattle are wagyu and angus, and they'll grow up eating macadamia meal and drinking beer that we grow and produce here on the ranch."
The owners of Elwood's first shared (archived) their satirical rumor about Zuckerberg on Jan. 10.
Snopes recently reported about another satirical rumor about Zuckerberg, one that claimed he defended a decision to fly a Confederate flag at Facebook's headquarters. We also addressed similar untrue claims about dog meat in the past, including for example a story from 2017 positing New York police arrested a Chinese immigrant for selling hot dogs containing dog meat, and a rumor that a photo shows Trump Cabinet nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. holding the carcass of a cooked dog.
For background, here is why we alert readers to rumors created by sources calling their output humorous or satirical.
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