Image shows cat rescued in Thailand after the 2024 earthquake in Taiwan instead of cat

Thousands of people killed in neighboring Thailand after a magnitude 7.7 earthquake that hit Myanmar in late March, circulating a building on social media, falsely claiming they released a cat from the Thai capital. In fact, the photos were taken after the shock that hit Taiwan in April 2024.

“A cat was rescued from a collapsed building in Bangkok,” the Myanmar Language Facebook post read in a Burmese Language Facebook post published on March 29, 2025.

The post shared an image of an orange cat in pieces rescued by a man wearing protective gear. It has been shared on Facebook over 900 times.

A skyscraper collapsed in Bangkok and killed dozens of construction workers after a devastating earthquake on March 28.

Myanmar’s ruling military government also said on April 8 that it had killed more than 3,600 people in the country (archived link).

Several Facebook users in Myanmar share the same claim, but in fact, the images show a cat rescued a cat after an attack on Hualien in eastern Taiwan in April 2024.

A reverse image search on Google found the first photo released in a report by Taiwan’s Central News Agency (CNA) on April 13, 2024, which attempted to rescue the cat from the Uranus building in the city (archive link).

The CNA report also said the owner tried to rescue her cat.

The 7.4 earthquake caused the glass-hanging Uranus building to tilt unstablely, becoming the symbol of Taiwan’s strongest earthquake in 25 years (a link to archive).

The second photo was published on the same day as Taiwan’s news media Liberty Times (archive link).

The local Formosa TV published a similar video that captured the moment the cat was rescued and brought to the veterinarian for treatment (a link to the archive).

AFP examined the distorted visual effects of facts related to the Myanmar earthquake.