2009 photo used to falsely claim that horse allegedly stolen from police during Kenyan protests in June 2024 died
IN SHORT: A reverse image search of the dead horse shows that the image has been online since 2009. No police horses were reported stolen during the recent anti-tax protests in Kenya.
A tweet on X (formerly Twitter) shows an image of a dead horse. The tweet reads: "The horse that Gen Z had stolen from fingerless cop as plan B has been found dead."
Some social media posts using the same image for the same claim can be seen here, here and here. The posts have been viewed tens of thousands of times and have received lots of engagement.
After days of protests over anti-tax legislation, Kenya's president William Ruto withdrew the controversial Finance Bill 2024.
But as the protests raged the police confronted the protesters, resulting in over 200 arrests. One police officer also lost both his arms.
The anti-riot police included officers on horseback for crowd control.
The protests were widely documented. This included videos showing two young men riding horses skilfully. This led to online claims that the men may have stolen the horses from the police.
It was in this context that the image of the dead horse began to circulate, with new claims that the allegedly stolen police horse had died. But are these claims true? We checked.
Horse not stolen
One of the videos has a TikTok watermark with a username. Visiting this TikTok page reveals more videos of the young men riding horses, including many of the same videos circulating on social media that claim to be from the protests.
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But these videos were actually taken before the 18 June 2024 protests. News reports, such as this, also confirm that the pictures and videos were not taken during the protests as claimed. There have been no credible reports of police horses being stolen during the protests.
Dead horse photo from 2009
A reverse image search of the dead horse shows the picture has been online for 15 years. The image appears in an article published on 24 March 2009 discussing horses being poached and slaughtered for their meat on the black market in Miami, United States.
The article, originally published on NBC Miami, is about a racehorse called Wings who was found on the side of a road in Miami, stolen from his stable and slaughtered for meat. The image used in the tweet is from this incident, not the Kenya 2024 protests.
The claim that the image shows a dead horse stolen from Kenyan anti-riot police during the protests is false. No police horse was stolen, and the image of the dead horse was taken in the United States in 2009.
