Man convicted of hate crime after training dog to give Nazi salute

A Scottish man who was arrested after he trained a dog to give a Nazi salute was found guilty of a hate crime Tuesday.

In 2016, Mark Meechan posted a video that showed him teaching his girlfriend's pug to raise his paw upon hearing "sieg heil" or "gas the Jews." The video was viewed more than a million times. Meechan defended his behavior as a way to prank his girlfriend, and said after he was arrested that he doesn't "actually hate Jewish people."

In the video, Meechan says that his girlfriend often talked about "how cute" her dog was, "so I thought I would turn him into the least cute thing I could think of, which is a Nazi." But officials in the U.K. disagreed that it was a harmless joke. The judge involved in the case said that Meechan "knew that the material was offensive" and that he must have known it was "grossly offensive to many Jewish people," reports The Jewish Chronicle.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Meechan's sentencing will take place in April. Read more at The Jewish Chronicle.