Fact check

In May 2022, several YouTube videos about rare dog breeds showed a doctored thumbnail of a black “dog” with weird stripes:

We also found the same photograph of the animal in an online advertisement. It displayed the words “Family thought they adopted a ‘dog’, but when the vet sees him, he calls the police.” The announcement led to a 52-page slideshow article which revealed on page 52 that the story was “a work of fiction created for entertainment”. At the end of the story, the vet calls the police because he knew the dog was missing and wanted to make sure he was returned to his owner.

As some readers might tell, this larger version of the “rare dog breed” makes its counterfeit a bit more obvious.

So where does it come from? We first searched a reverse image search on Google Images, but found nothing. We then turned to another reliable reverse image search website: TinEye.com. Thanks to TinEye, we learned that it originally showed a black panther:

We found the original image on a wallpaper website, but were unable to locate the name of the original photographer.

We previously reported on other stories that also showed misleading images of animals. Some of them also involved YouTube thumbnails, online advertisements, and even fictional stories involving a vet. For example, there was a photo of a “giant lion” which turned out to be an image from a print ad for Jeep Wrangler Unlimited. We also posted fact checks on stories involving a “giant snake” and a “giant crocodile”, both of which included the same vet plot.

In short, the image of the alleged “rare dog breed” had been doctored and originally showed a black panther.

Sources:

“Black panther in the grass.” PHPographyhttp://phpography.com/black-panther-in-the-grass.html.

TinEye Reverse Image Search. https://tineye.com/.