Is this dog really badly burned and disfigured from a house fire?

A photo apparently showing a badly burnt dog is spreading on social media. The photo shows a dog with an apparent injury of some kind. The photo is circulating with a number of captions, some claiming the dog was burned trying to save his family from a house fire, others also claim the dog suffers from “canine cystic fibrosis”.

The photo has managed to accumulate many hundreds of thousands of shares across Facebook and many retweets on Twitter, with many users sending their best wishes to the canine in the photo.

This poor dog was badly burnt and disfigured trying to save its family from a house fire despite having canine Cystic Fibrosis.
1 like = 1 prayer.
1 share = 10 prayers.

This poor dog was badly burned and disfigured trying to save his family from a house fire.
One like = one prayer
One share = ten prayers

However many more observant and acute viewers quickly determined that the photo was nothing more than a hoax, namely because the dog clearly has a slice of ham on its face.

Perhaps on a flippant, cursory glance the dog could initially have appeared like it had suffered some horrific injury (we’re giving people the benefit of the doubt here) but a closer examination soon reveals that is not the case.

It appears to have been uploaded to Facebook by a known Internet prankster, who later revealed that despite adding one of the misleading captions, the photo was not his, finding it elsewhere on the Internet.

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And the photo has also been used by like-farming pages trying to accumulate followers by deception and exploitation.

The poor dog in the photo may certainly be poor indeed, but not because he was badly burnt or disfigured in a house fire, but because we simply don’t know how long he had to wait with a slice of ham on his face before his owner presumably let him eat it.

It appears that – for some reason – even Facebook themselves were fooled into thinking the photo was real, albeit possibly because of some automated-filtering process. They hid many instances of the photo from view because of “graphic content”. Well, we’re not sure we’d agree with that assessment.

Observation and a small dose of scepticism are pretty important online, as many users found out. This dog may have had ham on his face, but plenty of Facebook users were left with egg on their face after falling for the prank.