A picture shows a dog that someone hit with their truck in Worthing. The dog can’t stand, isn’t microchipped and his owner is being sought out.
This is a false appeal. The picture was taken from a 2018 article about a dog that was hit on the M1.
A post on Facebook shows a picture of an injured dog, claiming: “I hit this pup with my truck in Worthing he is alive but he can’t stand. I feel so miserable, I took him to the vet, he is not chipped. I know someone is looking for him. Please bump this post to help me find the owner.”
The post has over 1,200 shares in a local Facebook group advertising jobs in the West Sussex towns of Worthing and Littlehampton.
Although the post was shared on 15 January, the image in the post was taken from a 2018 article about a dog called Thor who was hit by a car on the M1 in Nottinghamshire. Although he was hit by a vehicle, as the post claims, everything else it says is false. He was microchipped, and the highways officer who witnessed the accident later applied to adopt him after the owners said they didn’t want him back.
We often see posts like this claiming to be looking for the owners of lost dogs, missing children, identifying people involved in accidents, missing elderly people and even abandoned babies.
Often these posts have the comments disabled, presumably to stop other users pointing out the post is fake. We’ve also seen several examples of these posts being subsequently edited to advertise surveys or housing websites.
Image courtesy of Tadeusz Lakota
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 the picture was taken from a 2018 article about a dog hit on a motorway.
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