Fake News: Dog Does NOT Fall Into Canal And Starts To Drown, Until The Group of Dolphins Come To Save Him

Hoax Alert

  • by: Alan Duke
Fake News: Dog Does NOT Fall Into Canal And Starts To Drown, Until The Group of Dolphins Come To Save Him

Did a dog fall into a Florida canal and almost drown before a dolphin rescued it, as pictured in this story? No, that's not true: The image purportedly of a brown dog riding on the back of a dolphin is from a short film titled "Zeus and Roxanne," which was created by a Dutch filmmaker. There was a doberman named Turbo who in 2011 fell into a canal and was rescued hours later after neighbors noticed two dolphins making a stir about it. While the true tale of what happened to Turbo is a good dog-gone story, much of what is said in this viral article published eight years later is fishy click bait.

The misleading version of Turbo's dolphin encounter is an article (archived here) published by healthyfoodhouse.com on August 19, 2019 under the title "Dog Falls Into Canal And Starts To Drown, Until The Group of Dolphins Comes To Saves Him". It opened:

Dolphins are one of the smartest animal species on Earth, and their brain size compared to the average of their body size is second only to humans.

These amazing creatures have been known to imitate human actions, solve complex problems, follow recipes, and respond positively to television by expressing curiosity when moving images were displayed on a device. Scientists have found that they can create personalized whistles that act as names for individual members of a pod.

This is what social media users saw:

The image of the dog riding on the dolphin's back made a lot of people click to read the full story of the rescue, with the idea that it depicted what happened. But that's not the dog, the dolphin, or anything close to what happened to Turbo. It's a screen grab from this short film titled "Zeus and Roxanne." It runs just six minutes and you can watch it here:

The misleading 2019 article gets some details of the 2011 watery drama right, but so much is wrong that we rated it false. Instead of wasting your time with it, we suggest you meet the real Turbo in this 2011 local news report:

NewsGuard, a company that uses trained journalist to rank the reliability of websites, describes healthyfoodhouse.com as:

A diet and lifestyle site that promotes potentially dangerous and unproven natural health remedies.

According to NewsGuard the site does not maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability. Read their full assessment here.

We wrote about healthyfoodhouse.com before, here are our most recent articles that mention the site:

Want to inform others about the accuracy of this story?

See who is sharing it (it might even be your friends...) and leave the link in the comments.:


  Alan Duke

Editor-in-Chief Alan Duke co-founded Lead Stories after ending a 26-year career with CNN, where he mainly covered entertainment, current affairs and politics. Duke closely covered domestic terrorism cases for CNN, including the Oklahoma City federal building bombing, the UNABOMBER and search for Southeast bomber Eric Robert Rudolph. CNN moved Duke to Los Angeles in 2009 to cover the entertainment beat. Duke also co-hosted a daily podcast with former HLN host Nancy Grace, "Crime Stories with Nancy Grace" and hosted the podcast series "Stan Lee's World: His Real Life Battle with Heroes & Villains." You'll also see Duke in many news documentaries, including on the Reelz channel, CNN and HLN.

Read more about or contact Alan Duke

About us

International Fact-Checking Organization

Lead Stories is a fact checking website that is always looking for the latest false, deceptive or inaccurate stories (or media) making the rounds on the internet.
Spotted something? Let us know!.

Lead Stories is a:


Follow us on social media

Most Read

Most Recent

Share your opinion
https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2019/08/fake-news-dog-does-not-fall-into-canal-dolphin-does-not-save-him.html
leadstories.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-24
84571
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:R4GBPX4KCTEXPWSG7OSFHGHKRSUKSCQG
<urn:uuid:e3a90dc6-9ab3-40a9-b1fa-c2226cb2d23a>
2020-05-25T11:29:43Z
104.22.29.177
text/html
sha1:F6KHHPKLXHNJNHVABHUR4ONHT756UBZA
<urn:uuid:f3390681-8fd3-4021-9c4f-b985f02f9402>
https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2019/08/fake-news-dog-does-not-fall-into-canal-dolphin-does-not-save-him.html
response
<urn:uuid:018334d0-dfcf-4025-9ad1-08a27539ee84>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-24
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for May/June 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-236.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.16 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/