Picture of child carrying a dog in steel bowl is not from Pakistan floods

Claim: A picture shows a child walking in neck-high water while carrying a dog in a steel bowl during the floods in Pakistan.

Fact: The image is, in fact, from the Phung Hiep market in Vị Thanh in the Hậu Giang province of Vietnam. It was taken by Nguyen Thanh Ly on 28 November 2009.

On 25 August 2022, Twitter account @Sabqat_21 posted a picture of a child walking in neck-high flood water while carrying a dog in a steel bowl, implying that the image indicates those impacted by the unprecedented floods in Pakistan. The tweet is archived here and the caption, when translate to English, reads:

“You elitist rulers! Look here, a child is saving the dog from their home without caring about their life, this is politics because this child knows that the dog is a part of their house! O cruel and oppressive rulers of the time, may God drown you all, you people don’t even have the kind of loyalty this child has. Die!!”

This summer, Pakistan has been hit by catastrophic flooding, which has rendered millions homeless and destroyed entire villages. The disaster, which many say is due to climate change and bad government policies, has left a third of the South Asian nation submerged.

Fact or Fiction?

Soch Fact Check has found the photograph is not from Pakistan. We ran a reverse image search coupled with relevant keywords and found that the picture has been shared numerous times over the years, such as by the Fridays For Future’s Bangladesh chapter in June 2022, Facebook page ‘Celebrity Couple’ in July 2016, and non-profit organisation Global Giving in December 2014.

The earliest instance we encountered during our search was on 12 February 2010 in a WordPress blog, ‘Gioviet’s Blog’.

Soch Fact Check also found a similar image but from a different angle published by Vietnamese newspaper VnExpress on 13 September 2018 and in the outlet’s picture gallery with the following caption:

“This photo was taken [on] my journey from Hau Giang province, through An Giang province. When [I was] near Phung Hiep market, suddenly I saw a boy [was] swimming in the flood, with a dog and a basin on his head. This was such a beautiful moment so I decided to capture [it] with my camera. So many foreign people have downloaded this photo after I posted it on my Facebook page and said this is a boy in their country. But that’s not true.”

It is credited to Nguyen Thanh Ly, whose Flickr account also has the same picture (archived here). According to the photographer, the image was shot on 28 November 2009 in the Phung Hiep market in Vị Thanh in the Hậu Giang province of Vietnam.

We also found the image in question on Flickr, the online image hosting service, posted by an account named ‘s gendera’, archived here; its description states that it shows the “Status of environment in Bac Lieu Province, Viet Nam”.

Virality

Apart from the post by @Sabqat_21, Soch Fact Check found the picture posted here on Twitter, as well as here and here on Facebook and here on Instagram.

Conclusion: The picture is, in fact, from the Phung Hiep market in Vị Thanh in the Hậu Giang province of Vietnam. It was taken by Nguyen Thanh Ly on 28 November 2009.