The Scoop New York is the only news outlet to consider newsworthy taxpayer-funded cruelty toward homeless companion animals, as well as decades of officials’ deliberate abuse — psychological, physical and financial — of the New Yorkers who care about them.

Tax-deductible donations and paid subscriptions make it possible for The Scoop New York to investigate and expose kill-pound corruption statewide. Tap or click here to donate or subscribe. Thank you.

Headlines from Buffalo to Brooklyn

It’s April 25, 2026. This is The Weekly Poop.

This week, The Scoop New York was busy preparing for the first installment of The Weekly Carnage, a new feature from sister site NYC ACC KILLS, to be published Monday.

Meanwhile, true to form, the failed serial-killer aspirants at Animal Care Centers of New York City [sic] were busy supplying content, as Mayor Zohran Mamdani was occupied celebrating himself while neglecting the animals he exploited to get elected and ignoring questions from a reporter whose work he saw fit to cite during his campaign.

For new and non-subscribers (here’s how to fix that), The Weekly Carnage — named after a feature I maintained during my years covering New York City traffic violence — will memorialize the most recent NYC DOH ACC victims, who will also be honored in monthly NYC ACC KILLS memoriam posts.

The Weekly Carnage will complement The NYC DOH ACC Puppy/Kitten Death Row Show, coming at you live on The Scoop New York dot com on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. As of now the plan is to launch the show sometime in May.

In addition to victims DOH/ACC drags to their deaths in view of New Yorkers and others around the country (and the planet) trying desperately to save them, The Weekly Carnage and the Death Row Show will devote much time calling attention to victims like Bear.

Would you believe about half the cats and dogs DOH/ACC puts to death are never offered for adoption? Of course you would.

These exterminations — thousands per year — are known around the world as “silent kills.” They are cats and dogs (and rabbits and guinea pigs, no doubt) whom the public never sees, or sees incidentally on the victims’ way to the death chamber. Many are killed upon admission, on the spot.

These victims never appear on the “[placed] at-risk [by us]” death row list, because DOH/ACC/Zohran Mamdani don’t even pretend to give them a chance to live. I would note here that every silent kill is a prima facie violation of ACC’s contract with New Yorkers, but ACC watchers have long known that the 34-year no-bid renewal of that dirty deal, engineered by Mamdani role model Bill de Blasio in collaboration with simpatico City Council accomplices, was never worth the paper it was printed on. So that goes without saying.

DOH and ACC classify many silent kills as “end of life services” or whatever Clear Skies Initiative horse shit euphemism is currently favored by ACC mentors-slash-partners in corruption like ASPCA, Best Friends and others of their greasy ilk. Silent kill victims’ discretionary exterminations are footnoted on ACC data reports only because ACC is required to include them. They are not counted as “euthanasia” victims, however, because doing so would make it impossible for DOH and ACC to juice their live release rates.

So poor dogs like Bear, age 8, found abandoned and exterminated nine days later, are killed without ever being offered for adoption. Ditto Drifter, 6, who went from a bite hold “straight to kill command.” Grizzly, who had renal disease and was exterminated on day three. And Tinkerbell — a year-old puppy, who might just be DOH/ACC/Mamdani’s favorite targets — of whom a volunteer said, “All she wanted was to be close to me, pressing her head into my body and leaning her whole weight against me for comfort.”

There are many more victims, of course. More than we have time or space for here. Via The Weekly Carnage and the Puppy/Kitten Death Row Show, these cats and dogs, tortured and killed around the clock by The Greatest City in the World™, will have their day.

Facts: If you can look at Bear’s terrified, pleading face and want to do anything other than take that dog home and protect him forever, you are mentally ill or a natural-born stone killer, a distinction without a difference. Whether you wield the needle or stand by and watch it happen.

Either way, the people are gathering at the gates. The doors to your pervert playhouse are fixing to bust open.

Time to brace.

Here’s the latest New York companion animal news:

• You can love companion animals or you can love watching their adoptive families terrorized by the government, but not both.

• Buffalo Mayor Sean Ryan, who campaigned on cleaning up his city’s shithole “shelter,” is instead cutting his kill pound’s budget, virtually ensuring more animals will suffer and die there. But don’t worry — Ryan dispatched a surrogate to promise a new shelter sometime in the future.

• Hudson Valley congressional rep Mike Lawler announced a bipartisan effort to amend federal law to help prevent public housing residents from losing their pets. Your turn, Albany.

• Rescues say legislation NYC Council members are considering to legalize bodega cats will actually codify neglect and do nothing to help other “working cats,” like the ones landlords starve to prod them to kill rats.

• Jamestown lawmakers are considering imposing a limit on the number of cats residents may have.

• Susquehanna SPCA in Otsego County took in a dozen neglected dogs from Washington County, where as TSNY noted last week supervisor Brian Campbell opposes a local campaign to shame his county into finally building a shelter of its own.

• Lollypop Farm of Rochester says the usual spring influx of homeless companion animals may be augmented this year by households facing eviction. Your turn, Albany.

• A reward is available in Cortland County for help identifying whomever tortured and killed three dogs found by a roadside in the Town of Scott.

• “Authorities in Oswego County say they are investigating what may be one of the worst cases of animal abuse they have ever encountered.”

• Greater Cayuga SPCA, f.k.a. Finger Lakes SPCA of CNY, is set to reopen after a year-long construction project. Meanwhile, Little Guild Animal Shelter in Cornwall is prepping for an open house to debut its new 8,000 square-foot facility.

• Time Out New York gave a shoutout to White Whiskers Senior Dog Sanctuary — profiled by TSNY in 2024 — as a top rescue for adopters.

• Political reporter and essayist Hamilton Nolan explains why a government decision-maker should never be happy to see a reporter, which should cause many many New York journos to feel seen.

• Finally: Nathan Winograd of the No Kill Advocacy Center throws down on Best Friends Animal Society — which ICYMI (as yours truly did) began as a cult. Really.

Food recalls

FDA announced one pet food recall this week:

• Breeder’s Edge, Shelter’s Choice canine milk replacer (“variable levels of vitamin D”)

Check here for more info on FDA-announced recalls, and here for details on prior FDA advisories and outbreaks.

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The Scoop New York is the only news outlet to consider newsworthy taxpayer-funded cruelty toward homeless companion animals, as well as decades of officials’ deliberate abuse — psychological, physical and financial — of the New Yorkers who care about them.

Tax-deductible donations and paid subscriptions make it possible for The Scoop New York to investigate and expose kill-pound corruption statewide. Tap or click here to donate or subscribe. Thank you.

Animal Care Centers of New York City exterminated 3,202 cats and dogs in 2025, according to NYC ACC data.

That figure reflects an average of one cat or dog put to death at ACC about every three hours. Non-stop, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

NYC ACC killed 1,508 cats last year, and 1,694 dogs — virtually all of them healthy and adoptable when they entered the kill pound system.

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ACC exterminated 31,830 cats and dogs combined from 2016 through 2025, according to system data.

The number of cats and dogs killed by ACC dipped in 2024 for the first time since 2020. The decline was short-lived: Last year’s total marked an 8 percent increase in combined cat and dog killings compared to 2024.

Worse, 2025 was the second deadliest post-pandemic year for cats and dogs at NYC ACC, with just 33 fewer victims than the combined total from 2023.

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The Scoop New York is the only news outlet to consider newsworthy taxpayer-funded cruelty toward homeless companion animals, as well as decades of officials’ deliberate abuse — psychological, physical and financial — of the New Yorkers who care about them.

Tax-deductible donations and paid subscriptions make it possible for The Scoop New York to investigate and expose kill-pound corruption statewide. Tap or click here to donate or subscribe. Thank you.

Headlines from Buffalo to Brooklyn

It’s April 18, 2026. This is The Weekly Poop.

Animal Care Centers of New York City [sic] exterminated a significantly higher number of homeless cats and dogs during Zohran Mamdani’s first two months as mayor compared to kill totals reported during the same time period in 2025, Eric Adams’ last year in office, according to ACC data.

As reported this week on NYC ACC KILLS, ACC carried out a total of 499 cat and dog killings in January and February, compared to a total of 427 in the first two months of 2025 — a 17 percent jump. Dog exterminations over those two months rose year-to-year from 248 to 280, a 13 percent increase. Elective cat killings spiked 22 percent, from 179 to 219.

Contrary to agency propaganda, virtually all cats and dogs killed by NYC ACC are healthy and adoptable when they enter the pound system.

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The Scoop New York asked Mamdani’s press office if the mayor could account for the increase in discretionary homeless companion animal killings on his watch. We also asked why Mamdani permits ACC officials to continue to falsely claim the city pound doesn’t kill healthy animals, and if the mayor is in the main copacetic with agencies he’s in charge of lying to New Yorkers.

As with all prior queries from The Scoop New York concerning his kill pound as well as companion animal welfare generally, the mayor who preaches accountability and buck-stoppage at every opportunity had nothing to say.

TSNY is working up a comprehensive analysis of NYC DOH ACC 2025 kill data for publication next week. In the meantime, below are excerpts from the NYC ACC KILLS February 2026 memoriam post. Read them and weep. Because the cowardly conniving hypocrite most responsible sure as shit won’t.

Eminem Meowthers [247972]: 3 years old; killed February 28. Eminem Meowthers, a stray cat, who was noted to be calm and timid, was listed for medical reasons. ACC wrote: “He is a young sweet cat and recovering from a urinary obstruction. He needs monitoring and pain management in a veterinary clinic to recover.” Instead, ACC killed him on day 10.

Scoob [244378]: 1 year old; killed February 27. Puppy Scoob, says a volunteer, was “69 lbs of adolescent energy and behavior. And yet he managed to disarm us with his charm. Running across the yard he flew onto a lap, and a summer Olympics would say he stuck the landing. I truly don’t think he cared that he was entirelv too big to fit, he was pleased to be where he was.”

Scoob, a stray, was found outside a pizzeria eating from the trash. Apparently, he stole a glove from someone’s pocket to play with, but politely dropped it when asked. On intake ACC wrote that he was “very sweet and friendly.” His leash biting, for which ACC killed him, began only after he’d been at ACC for a few weeks. Scoob was killed on day 64.

Doeby [183902]: 4 years old; killed February 4. Everyone loved Doeby, who lost her family when they moved to NYCHA housing. Gentle, loving, and loyal, her family said. Volunteers agreed. “She listened well, loved treats, and soaked up attention. She was playful but also happily content,” one said.

Another said, “This incredibly affectionate, human-adoring pup, who once lived with other dogs in a home, has become increasingly stressed in the shelter environment and needs out. Doeby is a social butterfly and greets all her people on our way out of the shelter, and on our way back in.”

A great leash walker, Doeby loved exploring and also “loves to snuggle with you on the backyard bench or score a butt scratch or hug.” ACC killed Doeby on day 49.

Zoe [245893]: 2 years old; killed February 20. Zoe arrived at ACC with 30 bite puncture wounds from an altercation between dogs at her home. She had recently had a litter and was being kept in a separate room when the door was left open and the other two dogs got in.

The owners blamed Zoe. They called the police, who said Zoe remained calm in the crate during transport. At ACC she was very social, wiggly and wagging, easily leashed and walked, with no notes on or signs of aggression. She liked to toss toys in the air and catch them. ACC killed Zoe on day 33.

Nuevo [244513]: 2 years old; killed February 16. Nuevo, a timid stray, trembling during his medical exam, was social with staff despite feeling poorly most of his time at ACC.

ACC dosed Nuevo with a boatload of drugs: Trazodone, Clonidine, and Gabapentin. Nuevo had persistent GI issues, and ulcerated paw pads that caused him to limp.

Noted to be consistently panting, hyper salivating, and barking, ACC diagnosed kennel stress. Instead of working to alleviate that stress, ACC killed Nuevo day 57.

Here’s the latest New York companion animal news:

• You can love companion animals or you can love watching their adoptive families terrorized by the government, but not both.

• Both Zohran Mamdani and Donald Trump are looking to evict poor New Yorkers (and their pets) from their homes.

• Millionaire Kathy Hochul reportedly donated $2,102 to the “Erie County animal shelter” (whatever that is), which is rich (no pun intended) considering the governor and state lawmakers are why New York animal shelters are forced to survive on public donations.

• Related: Case in point.

• Related: “North Country animal shelters struggle to adapt to new state guidelines.”

• Related: Washington County supervisor Brian Campbell doesn’t get why locals want an animal shelter when taxpayers are already doing the job out of their own pockets.

• Oswego County has approved its own animal abuser registry; meanwhile, Saratoga County officials added the first perpetrator to their new roll.

• New York City Council Member Chi Ossé told Curbed the council is “brainstorming” legislation to save dogs from the city kill pound get people to clean up dog shit.

• ASPCA will spend 2026 reminiscing about the time before it became a self-interested resource-hogging investment vehicle that does animal advocacy on the side — when it isn’t doing the opposite of animal advocacy.

• Finally: Godspeed Garfield, saved from LIRR tracks by MTA police and now recovering after he was hit by a train.

Food recalls

FDA announced no pet food recalls this week.

Check here for more info on FDA-announced recalls, and here for details on prior FDA advisories and outbreaks.

Share

The Scoop New York is the only news outlet to consider newsworthy taxpayer-funded cruelty toward homeless companion animals, as well as decades of officials’ deliberate abuse — psychological, physical and financial — of the New Yorkers who care about them.

Tax-deductible donations and paid subscriptions make it possible for The Scoop New York to investigate and expose kill-pound corruption statewide. Tap or click here to donate or subscribe. Thank you.

Headlines from Buffalo to Brooklyn

It’s April 4, 2026. This is The Weekly Poop.

This week, the rabid hyenas at Animal Care Centers of New York City [sic] were feeling themselves.

Why wouldn’t they be? Spring has finally arrived, and with killings on the rise under absentee Mayor Zohran Mamdani — who at one week shy of his first 100 days has bravely avoided acknowledging his role as the highest of ACC higher-ups — the warm weather portends an abundance of puppies and kittens to obliterate before the little ones have a chance to know much of anything beyond the medieval dungeon that is the mayor’s kill pound.

To get the party started, with the tacit if not explicit approval of their minders at the city health department, the hyenas decided to have a little fun.

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Early in the week, ACC watchers — many of whom spend much if not most of their online time raising or making pledges to help overworked rescues save animals from the people New Yorkers pay to save animals — noticed ACC had changed a condemned dog’s name to a sentence.

From:

To:

Set aside for a moment the fact that, like countless other DOH/ACC victims, the city put this former family pet on death row because he “needs care and treatment [DOH/ACC] cannot provide.” Illness, often contracted or compounded thanks to porta-potty conditions at the “shelter” itself, is second only to fear among causative pre-extermination factors at DOH’s ACC. Despite the de facto city agency’s gold-plated no-bid 34-year $1.4B contract with New Yorkers, ACC’s crack veterinary staff, led by DVM Robin Brennen, is incapable of much more than vaccinating and exterminating. When they’re not dosing and overdosing animals with human-grade sedatives or spaying and neutering ahead of discretionary post-op killings, that is. Garbage in, garbage out, n'est-ce pas, Dr. B?

In 2022, Nathan Winograd of the California-based No Kill Advocacy Center wrote about a then-recent study that included adoption rates for dogs with names “perceived as nonhuman,” who tended to be passed over for dogs with more common names.

Wrote Winograd:

The dogs with the longest stay in the shelter … had unfamiliar names, like “Wigglystuff,” “Flufferton,” “Fruit Loops,” “Skittles,” and “Sir Pupper.” That, too, was my experience when I ran animal shelters.

Winograd continued:

[O]ne of those shelters was near Cornell University, where graduate students made up a significant portion of our volunteer base. These volunteers were fond of giving animals unfamiliar names based on their field of study, doing the animals no favor to the extent that “Molly” and “Ben” got adopted faster than “François-René de Chateaubriand,” “Edna Pontellier,” and “Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy.” (I finally told the Cornell students they weren’t allowed to name the animals.)

The Cornell students Winograd refers to were at least applying names, as opposed to random parts of speech and non sequiturs favored by DOH’s ACC.

Once normal folk on social media got wind of what the trolls were up to, ACC changed the name back. If you’re wondering what motivated this exercise in shit-assery, don’t trouble yourself overthinking it. It’s the same reason DOH/ACC spayed Chestnut, killed her soon after, and blamed the victim — blamed a dog — for her own death. From board chair Patrick “40K” Nolan to chief extermination officer Risa “Anyone Know How to Do My Job?” Weinstock to Robin “The Reaper” Brennan and on down the line, ACC principals practically ooze contempt for their four-legged charges as well as New Yorkers who have the temerity to expect them to, say, not behave like 14-year-olds left home alone for the weekend.

The particularly pernicious strain of nihilism infecting DOH’s ACC is how you get poor souls shunted to death row saddled with inscrutable handles like “Futon” (found abandoned with another dog ACC called “Bunk Bed” — get it?), “Foreign,” “Popcorn Shrimp,” “Telanovela” (ACC staff spell about as well as they do everything else), “Ceiling Fan,” and “White Eyeliner Is Tea.”

As they so often do, ACC goons are telling on themselves here. They give no more thought to these animals than to the office fridge stuffed with medication and remains. That includes those whose role is facilitating adoptions but who would rather an animal on the precipice of freedom be put to death than endure the inconvenience of making a phone call.

I’ve been a reporter for 25 years, give or take. For a decade I covered literal child killers, virtually all of them — those law enforcement bothered to prosecute, anyway — never showing remorse, only interested in saving their own hides. Even so, though I would never have thought it, the depravity I’ve witnessed in two years covering Animal Care Centers of New York City is unmatched. Like the man said, it’s hard to even take its measure.

There are no adults in the room at NYC DOH’s ACC. No one minding the store. TSNY’s latest query for Harvey Epstein went unanswered, like all others submitted to the freshman City Council member after he made a big to-do over his new “animal welfare caucus,” which hasn’t been heard from since, save for one worthy but politically pedestrian initiative that would do nothing to impose order upon the city “shelter” system.

As health committee chair, Epstein’s council colleague Lynn Schulman is supposed to keep watch over the mayor’s kill pound, but is aggressively if not defiantly uninterested in doing so, having failed to convene a relevant oversight hearing in years. Schulman simply could not care less what goes down at DOH’s ACC, meaning she’s perfect for her position.

Likewise, current comptroller Mark Levine, ostensibly the city’s fiscal ombudsman, is Schulman’s health committee chair predecessor. Levine held no hearings on the aforementioned ACC contract boondoggle, since he was occupied brown-nosing Risa Weinstock. It’s been 11 years since a city comptroller last investigated ACC. Expect the next audit after Levine lands his next government gig or Hell freezes over, whichever comes first.

Despite its size, New York City has a political class as insular and self-dealing as that of any corrupt rural backwater. Ultimately, of course, the buck stops with the mayor, who on inauguration day said this [emphasis added]:

We expect greatness from the cooks wielding a thousand spices, from those who stride out onto Broadway stages, from our starting point guard at Madison Square Garden. Let us demand the same from those who work in government.

Waiting on you, your honor. Still.

Here’s the latest New York companion animal news:

• You can love companion animals or you can love watching their adoptive families terrorized by the government, but not both.

• The Putnam County district attorney wants state lawmakers to pass a bill to make aggravated animal cruelty offenses again eligible for bail.

• Related: Queens DA Melinda Katz charged a “man” with felony cruelty for allegedly torturing his former girlfriend’s cat to death.

• After begging off due to difficulties working with the city, a local rescue has agreed to renew its contract with Syracuse, which has failed to build a facility of its own after years of allegedly looking for a suitable location.

• NYC ACC is gaslighting/brainwashing Bronx college students — and, apparently, their professor.

• A former Clinton County rescue operator who got 10 years probation for neglecting and abusing animals in her care was arrested for violating the terms of her plea deal.

• A Brooklyn woman and her dog, Grace, were reunited after the woman sued a neighbor she says volunteered to care for Grace temporarily but later refused to give her back.

• A scammer tried to trick a Syracuse-area woman out of her credit card info by posing as a CNY SPCA employee.

• NYPD shot and killed a dog in Queens, saving ACC the trouble of exterminating/disappearing him/her and lying about it.

• From New York Magazine: “Just as Americans are crossing borders and flying to other countries seeking cheaper dental and medical care for themselves, they are now doing the same for their pets.”

• PSA: Some of the most popular types of dog treats are not necessarily safe for dogs to consume.

• Finally: Godspeed, Jinx and carpenter Joe.

Food recalls

FDA announced no pet food recalls this week.

Check here for more info on FDA-announced recalls, and here for details on prior FDA advisories and outbreaks.

Share

The Scoop New York is the only news outlet to consider newsworthy taxpayer-funded cruelty toward homeless companion animals, as well as decades of officials’ deliberate abuse — psychological, physical and financial — of the New Yorkers who care about them.

Tax-deductible donations and paid subscriptions make it possible for The Scoop New York to investigate and expose kill-pound corruption statewide. Tap or click here to donate or subscribe. Thank you.

Headlines from Buffalo to Brooklyn

It’s March 28, 2026. This is The Weekly Poop.

This week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s gang of downward-punching bullies at Animal Care Centers of New York City [sic] took out their dissatisfaction with their pointless existences on Chestnut, a 5-year-old stray beloved by volunteers and staff members, whom ACC subjected to a medical torture killing they tried to justify by insisting the bitch was asking for it.

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There were other victims, of course. Like 7-month-old Godzilla, whom Risa Weinstock and Ellen Curtis and Gieun Im and Tara Mercado and Jessica Vaccaro and Robin Brennen and Biana Tamimi and Phillip Reid and Katy Hansen and the rest happily poisoned to death after all of 10 days, with no effort to place an easily placeable puppy in a loving home — that being their job and all — because killing is easy, they are lazy, and inflicting maximum pain upon animals and humans alike is their kink.

Chestnut arrived at ACC on New Year’s Eve and soon came down with kennel cough, a rite of passage for dogs at ACC due to ever-present unsanitary conditions. She was spayed on March 1.

Before and after alteration, DOH/ACC veterinary staff — or clerical staff; or kennel cleaners; or dog walkers; who knows? — drugged her with more Trazodone and Gabapentin than the recommended human adult dosages of each medication. Like exposing dogs to CIRDC, administering high doses of human-grade sedatives — to both cats and dogs — to induce compliant stupor is standard DOH/ACC practice.

I was on Trazodone for a while, for insomnia. The first time I took it I made the mistake of not going directly to bed. Sitting on the sofa, streaming “Adam-12” or whatnot, my arms and legs began to feel very heavy, as if weighted by cinderblocks. I could hardly move. The dizziness followed. To the point I wasn’t sure if I could, or should, try standing up. From then on, I never took Trazodone more than a few minutes before my head met the pillow.

In addition to Trazodone and Gabapentin, the DOH/ACC compliance cocktail includes Clonidine, of which Chestnut received almost twice the maximum dosage recommended for human adults. Again, standard practice.

Chestnut was spayed three weeks and change before her extermination date. Given the alarming number of spay-neuter-kills so far this year (TSNY’s A-list advos are keeping count), subjecting a cat or dog to alteration only to kill them soon after is edging toward routine for DOH/ACC malpracticing sawbones sadists.

Here’s what her foster said about Chestnut:

Meet this sweet girl who’s been an absolute dream in foster care! She adores cuddles and will happily snuggle up with you any chance she gets, especially when she’s cozy in her favorite jammies. She picked up loose-leash walking incredibly quickly and is a joy to take out for strolls. In the home, she’s been a perfect houseguest: no accidents, no chewing or getting into things, and no reactivity. She’s gentle, well-mannered, and ready to bring comfort, love, and lots of snuggles to her next home.

An ACC staffer agreed:

Chestnut arrived as a stray with no ID and has blossomed into a gentle, affectionate companion in shelter and foster care. She's a total snuggle bug who loves to be cozy (her foster even reports she enjoys cuddling up in her jammies) and is quick to offer affection. Though she shows some nervous body language likely from a difficult past, she warms up with calm, patient introductions and is an absolute sweetheart once she trusts you.

Below is what an ACC flack — Katy Hansen being the most logical perp, though we don’t know for certain since ACC and DOH haven’t replied to a single TSNY query this year — said about Chestnut when asked why DOH/ACC exterminated this “absolute sweetheart” in the prime of her life.

Here is the dog DOH/ACC says was so hopelessly vicious and out of control she had to die.

Not convinced? Here’s another clip, with a soundtrack that makes what Mamdani’s kill pound did to her that much worse.

A regular Cujo this one, huh?

The blithering idiot who sent that text, being a blithering idiot, was likely unaware that it presents as a confession, not just concerning Chestnut but every cat and dog DOH’s ACC puts to death for “behavior.”

They acknowledge that under normal circumstances — that is, a stable home environment, cared for by normal humans who don’t want to kill her because she is a dog — Chestnut was fine. They further acknowledge that, to the extent her behavior was an issue at all (spoiler: it was never an issue), “shelter” conditions were the primary precipitating factor.

This is what ACC does to every 1-2 cats and 2-3 dogs who enter the system. Cram them into cages in a cold, loud, filthy, hostile shithole, for 23 or more hours a day, surrounded by unfeeling strangers who want them dead, then kill them for reacting normally — naturally — out of fear and self-preservation.

Then the capper: victim-blaming. The blithering idiot refers to Chestnut as if she was an unrepentant miscreant who decided to wild out until she got what was coming to her, when to anyone with half a brain and a functioning moral compass she was obviously a frightened dog who wanted nothing but to love and be loved. “Part of the picture”? “Misleading”? Are you fucking serious?

There it is, clear as can be. DOH/ACC thugs exterminate because, if you ask them, their victims deserve it. Imagine being so feeble-minded, so mentally unstable that you are triggered by the actions of a cat or dog. Seriously: How do these knuckle-draggers make it to work every day?

The Scoop New York asked DOH and ACC for evidence that Chestnut was a raging hellhound who had to be put down lest she wreak bloody havoc upon the good people of New York City. They of course provided none, because there is none. Professional liars lie. It’s what they do.

Like his kill pound and the health department that pseudo-supervises it, Mamdani has ignored queries regarding ACC, even as his DOH death squad exterminated a significantly higher number of dogs in January than in January 2025. This might be because, given Mamdani’s amateurish flailing to this point, it’s unclear if his admininstration can walk and chew gum at once. More likely it’s that, like every other New York elected, his interest in companion animals begins and ends with how effectively he thinks he can use them for personal gain.

Either way, until mister “govern audaciously” lives up to his own hype, here’s the volume knob.

Here’s the latest New York companion animal news:

• You can love companion animals or you can love watching their adoptive families terrorized by the government, but not both.

• How embarrassing: Halfway through what is likely NYS lawmakers’ fourth consecutive no-show session, that renowned bastion of enlightened governance — Utah — made it illegal to kill animals rescues want to save. Skunked by a deep red state. Heckuva job, Lupardo & Hinchey.

• Related: Sullivan County Assembly Member Paula Kay has introduced a bill that would make felony animal cruelty eligible for bail.

• Related: Put these freaks under the jail.

• Mamdani made a campaign promise to boost funding for city parks, but has instead decided Eric Adams didn’t neglect them sufficiently.

• Animal Shelter of Schoharie Valley — the only shelter in Schoharie County for both cats and dogs — expects its new vet clinic to open in the fall.

• A new private shelter for dogs is coming to North Syracuse.

• “After Tragedy, an Ulster Park Woman Builds a Sanctuary for Rescued Pigs”

• FIFY: “Can I Shame My Mayor Into Acknowledging His Kill Pound?”

• Finally: What became of this cat? And the helicopter rescue was amazing, but how did this dog wind up in the middle of the river?

Food recalls

FDA announced no pet food recalls this week.

Check here for more info on FDA-announced recalls, and here for details on prior FDA advisories and outbreaks.

Share

The Scoop New York is the only news outlet to consider newsworthy taxpayer-funded cruelty toward homeless companion animals, as well as decades of officials’ deliberate abuse — psychological, physical and financial — of the New Yorkers who care about them.

Tax-deductible donations and paid subscriptions make it possible for The Scoop New York to investigate and expose kill-pound corruption statewide. Tap or click here to donate or subscribe. Thank you.

For the second year running, it appears state legislators and Governor Kathy Hochul will not reach a budget agreement ahead of the March 31 deadline, mostly because (for the second year running) Hochul is looking to shoehorn unrelated measures into the budget bill.

This is so the governor can please her corporate paymasters (fossil fuel companies; Uber) with relatively minimal blowback from good-government groups and the pesky public. That’s the idea, at least. It also allows legislators to vote for contentious extraneous measures they might otherwise prefer not to be associated with.

As Politico put it, “[I]ssues that aren’t easy to agree on are often the ones members avoid casting stand-alone votes on.”

As far as state politics are concerned, budget machinations will suck up most of the oxygen until the governor and legislators reach a deal. Once they clear that obstacle, state electeds can continue to ignore bills meant to improve the lives of companion animals and the New Yorkers who care about them.

Of the couple-dozen or so relevant bills tracked by The Scoop New York since TSNY went live two years ago, Albany lawmakers succeeded in passing just one, in 2025: a measure to prohibit insurance companies from discriminating against renters with pets based on what breed of dog they have — the same protections the state affords homeowners.

The renter protection bill did not become law, however. Hochul vetoed it.

As for this year’s docket, legislation to establish animal abuser registries; strengthen notoriously weak cruelty laws and streamline cruelty law enforcement; keep abused pets away from their abusers; spare animals from tortuous deaths in vacated rental housing; initiate a recurring revenue stream for shelters statewide; and more await passage.

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The Scoop New York is the only news outlet to consider newsworthy taxpayer-funded cruelty toward homeless companion animals, as well as decades of officials’ deliberate abuse — psychological, physical and financial — of the New Yorkers who care about them.

Tax-deductible donations and paid subscriptions make it possible for The Scoop New York to investigate and expose kill-pound corruption statewide. Tap or click here to donate or subscribe. Thank you.

Headlines from Buffalo to Brooklyn

It’s March 21, 2026. This is The Weekly Poop.

This week, NYC ACC KILLS is back.

Puppy victims; senior victims; spay-neuter-kill victims; sick and exterminated rather than treated victims; nonsensically-named victims; bonded family pets separated forever; family pets whose seriously ill, evicted and/or homeless humans, deceived by ACC propaganda, turned to the “shelter” believing it was the right thing to do — believing ACC would do what ACC says it does — unaware they were actually condemning their four-legged loved ones to a lonely, violent, terrifying untimely death: all are represented by cats and dogs exterminated in January by Animal Care Centers of New York City.

Below are excerpts from the January 2026 NYC ACC KILLS memoriam post, with a link to the original, followed by this week’s headline stack.

Read it and weep.

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Tres Leches [245003]: 10 years old; killed January 8. Tres Leches was an emaciated and dehydrated stray cat with a severe injury to his tongue. His finder said she saw Tres Leches outside about two months earlier and offered him food. Tres Leches ran into her home and refused to leave so she allowed him to come in and out for meals as he pleased. During his medical exam, he sat quietly and allowed all handling, giving soft headbutts when a hand was offered. He needed medical attention ACC doesn’t give and was killed on day three, when the mandatory stray hold time was up.

Tyrone [241631]: 6 years old; killed January 5. With his worried face and a gentle demeanor, Tyrone described by a handler as a “very chill boy” had a hellish time at NYC ACC. In isolation for CIRDC, which is endemic there; then over sedated by drugs (also endemic) until he wasn’t steady on his feet; those paws also painfully inflamed, probably from walking on salt in the winter. ACC neutered Tyrone, then killed him seven weeks after he arrived.

Zo Juniore [243208]: 2 years old; killed January 5. Zo Juniore was hopeful, noted to be friendly during his medical exam. It was all downhill from there. That he was easily leashed, wiggly, soft-bodied didn’t matter. Not wanting to go back in his cage, being afraid, was a nuisance. They didn’t make a video to help him find a home and took only one photo. Zo was one of countless dogs ACC doesn’t really try to save.

Zo, his human said, was active and playful, fond of tennis balls, running, and eating fruit. Given the triple cocktail of drugs, Trazodone, Gabapentin and Clonidine, NYC ACC killed Zo after 21 days.

Paige [241756]: 4 years old; killed January 21. Paige’s owner tied her to the “shelter” gate and drove away. A volunteer said, “This worried girl makes me ache. Paige cries softly as we interact with her, vigilantly looking around to study every sound … Toys brighten her spirits and show us the puppy within this 4-year-old girl — she chases and jumps and plays and momentarily forgets her worries until she remembers them again, of course.”

A staff member said, “She is curious and alert, but can became anxious…” Fear is a no-no at NYC ACC, where they killed Paige after two months.

Continue reading on NYC ACC KILLS

Here’s the latest New York companion animal news:

• You can love companion animals or you can love watching their adoptive families terrorized by the government, but not both.

• Yes, Council Member Epstein, glue traps are barbaric and should not be legal. Now if you’ll just look this way for a second.

• New York City media who willfully ignore the city’s non-stop culling of homeless cats and dogs can’t stop won’t stop talking about dog shit.

• Rochesterians furious over the city’s failure to protect companion animals from abusers are demanding stronger local laws and filing a lawsuit against the Rochester Police Department for “failure to adequately intervene in cases of animal neglect and abuse.”

• Meanwhile, the application of New York State’s already weak cruelty laws remains a joke: In Defense of Animals wants the public to speak up after an Oneida County judge sentenced Anaiya Harris of Utica to just six months in county jail for sealing her dog inside a closet to die, even after the judge, Robert Bauer, cited a pre-sentencing report indicating Harris, who could have received up to two years in prison, exhibited “a complete lack of remorse.”

• Related: Erie County DA Michael Keane allowed a Tonawanda man to plead guilty to one count of felony aggravated cruelty for stabbing a Boston Terrier to death in his home, and Judge Kenneth Case rejected the DA’s request to prohibit the perp from being around animals as he awaits sentencing (since in New York felony cruelty charges don’t qualify for bail).

• Related: A motorist who allegedly fled the scene after striking a man walking his dogs in Queens, severely injuring the man and killing one of his pets, is free to keep driving as his case proceeds (since career do-nothing taxpayer-check casher Melinda Katz, currently Queens DA, filed wrist-tap misdemeanor charges that don’t qualify for bail).

• Related: Oswego County SPCA is seeking donations and fosters after “one of the most significant multi-species rescue responses in recent OCAWL history” from a property in Sandy Creek whose owner is so far facing only misdemeanor charges.

• Related: The owner of a dog day care in Saratoga County was charged with two counts of criminal mischief — a class D felony — and one count of felony aggravated cruelty (a less serious charge) after investigators “found dogs and cats in rooms that were 100 degrees” while investigating the heat stroke death of a French bulldog, Gus, last summer, according to a local news report and court records reviewed by TSNY.

• Potentially related: “Humane Society investigates after dog found dead in dumpster on Rochester’s west side.”

• Finally: “Helping Hounds Dog Rescue [in Syracuse] is receiving 42 dogs [aged from seven months to two years] that will become available for you to adopt [on March 21].”

Food recalls

FDA announced no pet food recalls this week.

Check here for more info on FDA-announced recalls, and here for details on prior FDA advisories and outbreaks.

Share

The Scoop New York is the only news outlet to consider newsworthy taxpayer-funded cruelty toward homeless companion animals, as well as decades of officials’ deliberate abuse — psychological, physical and financial — of the New Yorkers who care about them.

Tax-deductible donations and paid subscriptions make it possible for The Scoop New York to investigate and expose kill-pound corruption statewide. Tap or click here to donate or subscribe. Thank you.

Headlines from Buffalo to Brooklyn

It’s March 13, 2026. This is The Weekly Poop.

This week, following the New York City Council’s “animal welfare caucus” pronouncement, it was nevertheless business as usual at the city kill pound, operated for decades with the council’s blessing by the most vile and prolific companion animal abuser/killers in the state, if not the nation: the management and staff of the non-profit contractor currently known as Animal Care Centers of New York City [sic].

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If you thought/hoped/prayed that caucus founder Harvey Epstein and Council Speaker Julie Menin had any intention of exercising their regulatory powers — that is, doing their jobs as City Hall overseers — to put a stop to the everyday torturing and killing happening now and always in their own backyards, well:

So much for Epstein and Menin and their council carcass caucus.

Mayor Affordability, meanwhile, continues to have nothing to say about New Yorkers doing NYC DOH ACC’s job for no pay. To the contrary, halfway through his third month in office, unless TSNY and our advocate A-listers somehow missed it (not likely), Zohran Mamdani has yet to publicly acknowledge his kill pound, or his responsibility to his city’s homeless companion animals, at all.

This leaves the unfortunate cats and dogs (and rabbits and guinea pigs) in DOH/ACC custody in the same position as ever: abandoned by duplicitous self-serving politicians and at the mercy of DOH/ACC defectives — New Yorker-hating ACC board members very much included — who get off on visiting pain and death upon those who can’t fight back.

You don’t have to guess how many frightened, hopeful, trusting, neglected, abused, battered, kicked, struck, cut, starved and sick homeless cats and dogs Mamdani’s DOH/ACC will choose to exterminate rather than rehome in the mayor’s first 100 days. Just multiply the number of intakes by .15 for cats and .25 for dogs, add the two products and you won’t be far off.

Month after month, year after year, the city “shelter” exterminates between one and two cats admitted, and two to three dogs, regardless of intake fluctuations. The kill quota — based on the amount of lollygagging DOH has determined ACC personnel should get by with — demands it.

The numbers are there for all to see:

If somehow DOH’s ACC took in but 10 cats and 10 dogs in a given month, bet your ass they would apply the needle to at least one of the cats and two of the dogs. Probably alter a couple or three and exterminate them during recovery, just for lulz.

When I say taxpayer-supported DOH/ACC staff get off on inflicting immeasurable pain upon animals and humans alike, I mean they get off on it.

This is tacitly or explicitly endorsed by Mayor Mamdani, whose interest in companion animals — same as every other elected official in New York State — begins and ends with his ability to use them for personal gain.

Sadly, self-aggrandizing rhetoric notwithstanding, Mamdani has thus far shown himself to be no more compassionate or moral than those who came before him, or those who will someday take his place.

The dead don’t lie.

Here’s the latest New York companion animal news:

• You can love companion animals or you can love watching their adoptive families terrorized by the government, but not both.

• Achtung Westchester County: “Rabid coyote attacks 3 people, 6 dogs in Eastchester and Bronxville area.”

• Achtung everybody: “More ticks are carrying multiple diseases, including Lyme, study shows.”

• Looks like you can add the horse carriage industry and literal animal sacrifices to the list of monstrous abuses Harvey Epstein and the NYC Council animal welfare caucus won’t be dealing with.

• The reconstituted board at CNY SPCA in Syracuse is said to be getting stuff done a month after former leadership resigned en masse.

• A new program to provide safe housing for victims of domestic violence in Rochester includes “animal care.”

• Rochesterians are calling out Lollypop Farm for inadequate enforcement of cruelty laws following a recent incident when several dogs were discovered confined outdoors in “subarctic conditions.”

• If you witnessed a couple publicly abusing a dog in East Williamsburg, near Morgan Avenue and Ingraham Street, on or about February 28, contact NYPD or ASPCA, which are reportedly investigating.

• NYC ACC is providing stipends for post-adoption vet care, which is hopefully not the same “care” provided by the city’s “care centers.”

• Finally: Turns out it doesn’t take a $1B contract to rehome animals who don’t fly off the shelf, just staff who aren’t malevolent dead-eyed freaks.

Food recalls

FDA announced no pet food recalls this week.

Check here for more info on FDA-announced recalls, and here for details on prior FDA advisories and outbreaks.

Share

TSNY is the only news outlet to consider newsworthy taxpayer-funded cruelty toward homeless companion animals, as well as decades of officials’ deliberate abuse — psychological, physical and financial — of the New Yorkers who care about them.

Tax-deductible donations and paid subscriptions make it possible for The Scoop New York to investigate and expose kill-pound corruption statewide. Tap or click here to donate or subscribe. Thank you.

Headlines from Buffalo to Brooklyn

It’s March 6, 2026. This is The Weekly Poop.

This week, the New York City Council unleashed a fresh assault on companion animals who live and suffer and die at the mercy of so-called Animal Care Centers of New York City [sic], as well as the New Yorkers who fight around the clock to get those animals out of ACC alive.

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On Monday, AMNY ran a press release published as news announcing that council Speaker Julie Menin and newly-elected East Side rep Harvey Epstein formed a caucus “dedicated to advocacy for the humane treatment of animals” and making the city “more friendly” for “those who care for them.”

The caucus reveal comes on the heels of a policy platform proposal issued by Flatbush Cats and Voters For Animal Rights, which among other measures calls on Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the City Council to fund spay-neuter surgeries and establish free pet food pantries. Available evidence suggests the timing was not coincidence.

“The launch of the Animal Welfare Caucus is a historic milestone for animals in New York City,” said VFAR Founder and President Allie Taylor, in a statement published by AMNY. “For years, advocates and constituents have called for sustained leadership on animal protection within the Council, and this caucus creates the structure to make that work lasting and impactful.

“Voters For Animal Rights looks forward to working with caucus members to advance thoughtful, effective legislation that reflects the values of New Yorkers,” Taylor said.

Couple things.

The reason the City Council does not have and has likely never had “sustained leadership on animal protection” is that council members like Lynn Schulman (endorsed by VFAR) and Justin Brannan (granted a prominent happy talk blurb on the Flatbush Cats/VFAR policy page) make sure of it.

Instead, the preferred move is to every few years make big promises about animal welfare departments or sustained help for cat rescues — initiatives that after the mics and cameras disappear are mutilated beyond recognition or whittled down to effectively nothing — then bring back the mics and cameras to congratulate yourself for a job left undone. Blather. Rinse. Repeat.

Epstein and Menin are running the playbook now — the caucus already appears on Epstein’s Wikipedia page — as accomplices like VFAR and ASPCA and HSUS, alongside credulous news outlets like AMNY, amplify the lie. Said lie being that you can be a Friend Of The Animals while willfully ignoring what is by far the biggest threat to vulnerable cats and dogs in the city’s history: the city itself, which torches hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars, along with the carcasses of tens of thousands of once and/or future family pets, via the always-open death chambers at NYC ACC.

TSNY queried Menin and Epstein as to whether the caucus will address the ACC kill quota; the oft-repeated goddamn lie that ACC doesn’t kill healthy animals; everyday ACC medical torture killings, specifically spay-neuter-kill; the routine violation of ACC’s open admission contract with the city; and the stagnant, recalcitrant, malicious, cowardly do-nothing ACC board.

Wouldn’t you know: Menin’s office acknowledged the query, then dodged it, passing it off to Epstein’s office, which never replied.

While ducking uncomfortable questions from a news org uninterested in press release pablum, Council Member Epstein — like candidate Mamdani before him — was exploiting companion animals for personal benefit: the calling card of FOTAs from City Hall to the Red Room.

As Epstein — an erstwhile Assembly member like Zohran Mamdani; a purported vegan like Justin Brannan and Eric Adams — pimps poor Simon, here are scenes from ACC death row. Mere snapshots of the day-to-day reality faced by homeless companion animals in the city’s custody, and the sadistic abuse purposely foisted by ACC upon IRL advocates who sacrifice their wallets and waking hours desperately trying to save those animals from extermination, knowing that many of the cats and dogs they have vicariously come to love won’t make it, and watching them vanish into the maw.

Imagine stories just like these by the thousands per year, every year, over the course of three decades, and tell me how electeds “dedicated to the humane treatment of animals” could ever stop working to stop the killing.

Call it a welfare caucus or a welfare office, until self-declared FOTAs like Epstein and Menin take up that task, all else is window dressing. Misdirection. Distraction. Gaslighting. Lies.

Only the truth will set them free. Who will be the first New York elected to speak it?

Here’s the latest New York companion animal news:

• You can love companion animals or you can love watching their adoptive families terrorized by the government, but not both.

• Related: Donald Trump’s war on the poors means more New Yorkers will have to choose between feeding themselves and their pets.

• Efforts to establish a statewide animal abuse registry look to have bipartisan support in Albany, which means exactly nothing as long as SARA killers Lupardo & Hinchey have a say.

• Court records reviewed by TSNY show an alleged unlicensed driver was charged with felony cruelty for dragging his dogs behind his car as he drove down a Queens street (ASPCA says the dogs are recovering, for whatever that’s worth), and New Yorkers are hell-bent on making sure justice is served.

• Might chronic under-funding and cheaping out on salary be why Rochester can’t find a qualified vet willing to work for its kill pound?

• Syracuse officials claim they haven’t managed to locate a suitable site for a municipal animal shelter despite a five-year search, which in addition to an admission of stunning incompetence is now a problem, since the private facility contracted to house stray dogs is ending its relationship with the city. Meanwhile, a Syracuse advocate is pushing for a new private shelter without “concrete walls where dogs sit in kennels all day.”

• Speaking of specious statements from sketchy officials, Town of Hempstead supe John Ferretti claimed in an op-ed that his kill pound is “a no-kill facility.” I’d say Tell it to Butchy, but TOHAS exterminated him.

• The City of Elmira will again beg Albany for funding it needs to bring its animal shelter into compliance with new state regulations, after the Hochul administration rejected the city’s first application for help with the governor’s half-assed unfunded mandate.

• ASPCA should put its big money where its big mouth is, says a former ASPCA CEO who for 10 years did no such thing.

• Like his health department, Zohran Mamdani’s DOE also hates cats.

• Fortunately, New Yorkers are never not helping.

Food recalls

FDA announced no pet food recalls this week.

Check here for more info on FDA-announced recalls, and here for details on prior FDA advisories and outbreaks.

Share

The Scoop New York is the only news outlet to consider newsworthy taxpayer-funded cruelty toward homeless companion animals, as well as decades of officials’ deliberate abuse — psychological, physical and financial — of the New Yorkers who care about them.

Tax-deductible donations and paid subscriptions make it possible for The Scoop New York to investigate and expose kill-pound corruption statewide. Tap or click here to donate or subscribe. Thank you.

Headlines from Buffalo to Brooklyn

It’s February 28, 2026. This is The Weekly Poop.

This week, in a story about the Flatbush Cats/Voters For Animal Rights proposal for NYC-subsidized vet care and pet food pantries, The City’s Katie Honan dropped a nugget that must’ve pricked the ears of companion animal advocates across the boros.

Meant to get the attention of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the Flatbush Cats/VFAR platform calls for new leadership at the Mayor’s Office of Animal Welfare, which Honan reports “has been without a leader — or anyone else working in its tiny office — since the beginning of the year.”

For real? How could you tell?

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The current incarnation of City Hall’s animal welfare office, of course, is the product of a 2019 bait-and-switch engineered by former mayor Bill de Blasio in cahoots with former City Council member Justin Brannan. Before the backroom switcheroo, electeds had New Yorkers believing their years of advocacy had given rise to a fully-funded and -staffed animal welfare department that would finally impose order upon the bloody chaotic grotesquerie that is Animal Care Centers of New York City [sic].

Instead, the MOAW enshrined into law by de Blasio and his council co-conspirators turned out to be nothing more than an outpost of the city kill pound public misinformation office, staffed by a single former ACC flack to sock-puppet DOH/ACC propaganda for access reporters who don’t know any better because they don’t care to.

Mamdani has an opportunity to change that. But during his first two months in office, the self-styled people’s mayor has AFAIK not once publicly acknowledged ACC’s existence, much less signaled interest in relieving New Yorkers of the unrelenting physical, financial and psychological burden of managing the city’s homeless cat population, a core responsibility ACC has somehow been allowed to shirk since Mayor 41 Shots brought the de facto agency into being 31 years ago.

It’s been said in this space before, but Mamdani doesn’t have to care about the endangered animals he crassly exploited to get himself elected. He just has to live up to his own hype.

Unless, like every mayor this century, he considers certain New Yorkers, and their struggle on his behalf, unworthy of his time.

You tell me.

Preparing for this column, The Scoop New York asked Mamdani’s press office about his plans for MOAW, if he is satisfied with what passes for leadership at DOH and ACC, and whether he has assessed conditions faced by homeless companion animals at his health department’s medical torture complex.

As with ever prior TSNY attempt to prod Mamdani to say something, anything about the family pet carcass factory he’s now responsible for, there was no reply. Which at this stage — in my experience covering politics and politicians, anyway — pretty much says it all.

Here’s the latest New York companion animal news:

• You can love companion animals or you can love watching their adoptive families terrorized by the government, but not both.

• City & State has a rundown of Albany electeds who say they’re hopping off the merry-go-round. No takebacks, now.

• Mamdani’s nascent NYCHA reforms don’t appear to include changes to Draconian pet policies that have led to an untold number of exterminations at the city “keEPiNg fAmiLIES ToGEtHeR” kill pound. An oversight to be remedied toot suite, surely.

• An animal rights lawyer joined Rochesterians in demanding local authorities enforce cruelty laws that are on the books, prosecute cruelty cases and get endangered animals to safety.

• Residents of Syracuse want action from Mayor Sharon Owens after officials failed for a year to develop a plan for a city dog shelter.

• Saratoga County’s animal abuser registry is live; now area state Senator Jim Tedisco says he wants one for New York State.

• Town of Hempstead officials adopted a law meant to regulate unlicensed “backyard breeding” by limiting the number of litters allowed annually, among other measures.

• NYC Council Member Chi Ossé thinks dogs should be seized from owners who don’t pick up their pets’ poop. Also: Note Gothamist casually propagandizing for ACC (again) re purported “record overcrowding”, which according to published ACC data is not a thing.

• Speaking of unvetted ACC horse shit: “The staff at the Animal Care Centers of NYC (ACC) love every single cat they look after at the shelter.”

• Finally: What Sarah McLachlan hath wrought.

The Scoop New York is now on Cash App

Food recalls

FDA recently announced two pet food recalls:

• Quest Cat Food Chicken Recipe Freeze Dried Nuggets [“May contain low levels of thiamine (Vitamin B1)”]

• Elite Treats Chicken dog treats [salmonella]

Check here for more info on FDA-announced recalls, and here for details on prior FDA advisories and outbreaks.

Share

The Scoop New York is the only news outlet to consider newsworthy taxpayer-funded cruelty toward homeless companion animals, as well as decades of officials’ deliberate abuse — psychological, physical and financial — of the New Yorkers who care about them.

Tax-deductible donations and paid subscriptions make it possible for The Scoop New York to investigate and expose kill-pound corruption statewide. Tap or click here to donate or subscribe. Thank you.

Note: The Weekly Poop will be off next week, and will return the week of February 23.

Editor’s note: Following publication of this post, VFAR Founder and President Allie Taylor told TSNY the two orgs “recommended establishing the Department of Animal Welfare to house ACC.” At this writing, the Flatbush Cats/VFAR “advocacy platform” page does not mention supplanting DOH ACC supervision.

Headlines from Buffalo to Brooklyn

It’s February 14, 2026. This is The Weekly Poop, NYC DOH ACC Valentine’s Day Massacre Edition.

This week, we’re discussing advocacy vs. advocacy*.

On Tuesday, Brooklyn Paper ran a story, by Kirstyn Brendlen, headlined “Animal welfare leaders urge Mamdani to step up for New York City’s pets.”

Brendlen’s article hinges on interviews with Flatbush Cats founder Will Zweigart and Voters For Animal Rights founder Allie Taylor, who are calling on Mayor Zohran Mamdani to, among other initiatives, devote a meaningful percentage of city fundage toward pet food pantries and lowering veterinary care costs, for spay-neuter surgeries in particular.

Though the piece gets a lot right — obligatory cooked ACC data citations definitely not included — it ignores the number one issue facing New York City companion animal advocates.

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It’s a decades-long scandal that is at least as urgent as the city’s spay-neuter crisis, and unlike spay-neuter can be remedied — right now, today — with one word spoken from the right mouth.

Of course I’m referring to the uninterrupted 31-year slaughter of adoptable cats and dogs at the blood-encrusted hands of the non-profit contractor currently known as Animal Care Centers of New York City [sic].

Considering Brendlen’s primary sources, its omission is to be expected.

Unlike most city journos, Brendlen acknowledges, kinda, NYC DOH as the agency calling the shots at ACC. Unlike most, the Brooklyn Paper story also acknowledges the type of common DOH skulduggery that betrays New Yorkers and preserves the status quo:

In 2024, animal activists and elected officials slammed the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene — which is responsible for funding most affordable spay/neuter surgeries in the city and oversees the city’s municipal shelters — for publicly telling the City Council it did not need more funding for spay/neuter, while privately expressing greater need.

This graf refers to a September 2024 City Council health committee hearing, chaired by Lynn Schulman, when harried New Yorkers testified for eight hours on the assorted terrors of devoting their lives to caring for the city’s 500,000 or so feral and otherwise stray cats — a job ACC should be doing, but doesn’t, and doesn’t have to, thanks to “frIEnDS oF ThE aNImAls” (FOTAs, as they’re known around here) like Schulman, who as their council overseer doesn’t superintend DOH/ACC laggards as much as pat them on the head and tuck them in after milk and cookies.

Zweigart and Taylor also want Mamdani — who, it has to be said, blew off Brooklyn Paper’s queries — to “enforce existing laws around breeding, licensing, and sterilization,” and “require transparent, quarterly public reporting from DOHMH.”

As to the DOHMH reporting bit, Brooklyn Paper also notes that one point of the Flatbush Cats/VFAR platform is new leadership at the Mayor’s Office of Animal Welfare. Notably, this ask stops short of calling on the mayor and City Council to take ACC away from DOH — whose half-ass job managing the kill pound system makes clear DOH resents the responsibility — by once and for all establishing a city department of animal welfare.

ICYMI: In 2019, after years of lobbying on behalf of homeless companion animals, New Yorkers were led to believe a fully-funded, reform-minded welfare department was all but a done deal.

Instead, former mayor (and current Mamdani mentor) Bill de Blasio and then-council member (and current private citizen, praise be) Justin Brannan shafted them by secretly spiking the animal welfare department in favor of an animal welfare office. As we know, MOAW turned out to be a do-nothing desk at City Hall occupied by a former ACC staffer, effectively quashing any hope of substantive ACC reform for the foreseeable future.

This is the part where we distinguish advocacy from advocacy*.

This screen grab is from the Flatbush Cats/VFAR policy page. You’ll notice the attribution leads us back to Justin Brannan, who lied to my figurative face when I (phone) interviewed him about the department of animal welfare bill, of which Brannan was lead sponsor, when it was still in the hopper.

As I wrote for Gothamist:

It remains to be seen whether a department of animal welfare, if established, is the key to finally reforming ACC. When Gothamist spoke with Council Member Justin Brannan, Intro 1478’s primary sponsor, he downplayed the notion, as an aide on the call expounded on ACC’s laudable live release rate.

Brannan, as my redneck childhood would say, was (and is) full of shit as a Christmas turkey. A phony. A fake. In short, a FOTA.

Brannan’s ratfuckery seven years back reverberates to this day in the form of a still-unaccountable DOH and its still-bloodthirsty kill pound, which during those seven years killed in excess of 16,000 adoptable cats and dogs.

Animals targeted for extermination by DOH’s ACC are not “humanely euthanized.” They are abused, terrorized, tortured, poisoned, butchered and exterminated.

“Neutered tho shitting blood / Now on death row” is Justin Brannan’s idea of compassion for animals. And it’s apparently Will Zweigart’s idea of a buncha dedicated public servants givin’ it their all.

Here’s Zweigart during a 2023 Brian Lehrer show appearance:

[ACC is] a safety net. We are asking the safety net, these hardworking folks at shelters across the city. Believe me, they have one of the most difficult jobs in animal welfare.

I’m a huge advocate for the employees and the volunteers at ACC. We are asking them to shoulder this burden and we are asking thousands of individual rescuers and nonprofit groups like us to shoulder this burden because the city, to date, and this will change, to date has just not invested anywhere near where they need to, to acknowledge this problem.

“They do an excellent job with an impossible situation,” Zweigart — unchallenged by Lehrer, natch — told hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers.

Sure. The compassionate, hard-working folk down at the ol’ kill pound who failed for 30 years to develop a plan to care for stray cats while insisting they have more than enough funds to do their jobs; who force affiliated rescues to forfeit their First Amendment rights under threat of permanent banishment; who dump more intakes onto those rescues than they rehome themselves; who shut their doors to the public for weeks at a time, “open admission” contract with the public be damned; who lie to New Yorkers about never killing healthy animals when killing healthy animals is what they are never not doing; who lie to New Yorkers about their attendant live release rates; who dose and overdose animals with human sedatives to keep them compliant; who exterminate cats and dogs for showing fear — that is, reacting normally to confinement 23.75 hours a day in a strange, loud, gory, filthy environment; who exterminate sick animals, rather than treat them, because they are sick; who exterminate animals who have homes waiting out of laziness and spite; who wall off their C-suite staff from the public; who in 2026 refuse to stream board meetings or site them in locations that aren’t deliberately difficult for many New Yorkers to access …

Need I continue?

As for Allie Taylor and Voters For Animal Rights, again:

Yeah.

Undoubtedly, Flatbush Cats saves lives. ASPCA saves lives, too — when it isn’t exterminating animals deemed no longer of promotional value or lobbying lawmakers to spike legislation to end the discretionary wholesale killing of adoptable cats and dogs or firing off random legal threats out of fear that someone might be horning in on its scummy resource-hogging racket.

If you’re asking for public donations and accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds, you at the very least owe people the truth, and the whole truth, ugly as it may be. Because they sure as shit won’t hear it from the likes of Lynn Schulman and Justin Brannan.

Whoever you are, you can not be a “huge advocate” for both the animals and the sawbones sadists who are gleefully exterminating them by the dozen literally as we speak. It is one or the other. Pick a side.

Otherwise, someday that asterisk morphs to quotation marks.

Here’s the latest New York companion animal news:

• You can love companion animals or you can love watching their adoptive families terrorized by the government, but not both.

• Democracy: Alive and well in Kathy Hochul’s New York. jk lol

• Retiring Albany lawmaker and proud SARA-killer Donna Lupardo told City & State she “plans to continue advocating for the issues she fought for in the Assembly” once out of office. Keep those pets close, people of Binghamton. You’ve been warned.

• Mamdani looks to be backing off campaign pledges to help New Yorkers make rent and pressure Albany to tax the rich. Quick study, this guy.

• Dr. Ashraf Hussein, the 56-year-old veterinarian who died inside a mobile vet clinic in Queens, succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning, according to OSHA officials investigating the case. A “small, white” dog Hussein was treating also died.

• Four Chautauqua County towns are looking to apply for a state grant to build a communal animal shelter. Who knows, maybe Albany tosses them some crumbs. Or maybe not!

• This could be a big deal: Buffalo’s Against All Oddz Animal Alliance is suing Rochester Police Department for not enforcing cruelty laws.

• Related: “The law is very vague, and it doesn’t specify anything. Usually that means we have to see some sort of suffering on the animal before we can act.”

• Related: “Hall said that she has recently seen an uptick in alleged animal cruelty cases — an issue she believes has been exacerbated by the lack of an animal shelter in Washington County.” New York in 2026, folks.

• Related: A Yonkers woman was charged with felony cruelty for allegedly abandoning Frankie, a year-old mastiff mix with a severe gash to his neck, outside in the elements last November.

• Related: New York animal cruelty laws continue to be weak and/or unenforced, ICYMI.

• New York State Animal Protection Federation, an anti-SARA kill-pound lobby group that endorses the obliteration of adoptable cats and dogs across New York State, got a press release published as news.

• Finally, in not-awful news: Hundreds of people turned out for the kitten bowl, an adoption event hosted by a rescue in suburban Buffalo, on Super Bowl Sunday.

Food recalls

FDA announced no pet food recalls this week.

Check here for more info on FDA-announced recalls, and here for details on prior FDA advisories and outbreaks.

Share

Headlines from Buffalo to Brooklyn

It’s February 7, 2026. This is The Weekly Poop.

As this column went to press last weekend, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani finally announced his choice to lead his health department.

Though loath to acknowledge its poor relation, in addition to duties that are more than glancingly related to public health, DOH is responsible for the dirty business going down 24/7/365 at the mayor’s kill pound, farmed out for three decades — and counting — to the contractor currently known as Animal Care Centers of New York City [sic].

As feared by Eric Adams-era DOH higher-ups, Mamdani chose against promoting temp health commissioner Michelle Morse in favor of Alister Martin, an “unexpected pick” from, of all places, the fackin’ Bay State.

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Martin of course brings a hefty CV: ER MD at Massachusetts General; assistant professor at Harvard (Mass General is a Harvard teaching hospital); and CEO of A Healthier Democracy, a non-profit based at Northeastern University described by City Hall as a “healthcare organizing incubator.” Martin also served as an advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“As Commissioner of DOHMH,” reads Mamdani’s press release announcing Martin and other cabinet picks, “Dr. Martin will help oversee the city's public health apparatus; monitor and manage disease outbreaks; and advance the Mamdani Administration's vision for a city where every New Yorker can find affordable, accessible, world-class healthcare.”

Best believe that, like his new boss, Dr. Martin takes the “A” train — or, more accurately, like his new boss, claims to.

From The City:

In his remarks at Saturday’s news conference, Martin said he no longer wanted to see health care become such a financial burden to patients.

“We are going to make sure that when a family walks into a health center, they can walk out not just healthier, but more financially stable,” he said. “We’re going to prove that public health is not just about disease. It’s about dignity, about stability, about making sure that no one gets left behind.”

Martin’s appointment may have been a surprise to the press corps and other City Hall knowers, but the reveal and attendant coverage were as predictable as DOH/ACC kill quota extermination rates, bogus and IRL.

About those New Yorkers who have carried ACC on their backs for as long as there has been an ACC — New Yorkers who sacrifice their own time and their own money, to the point that, for some, the possibility of losing their own homes is very real — the “affordability” mayor and his new DOH chief said nothing. Just as every news outlet that covered Mamdani’s multi-agency announcement — that’d be all of them, give or take — said nothing.

Pop quiz: When is a rogue de facto New York City government agency with a 30+ year, $1B+ no-bid contract, rammed through in darkness by the mayor in collusion with the City Council, not a story?

¡Claro!: A lawless city agency whose incompetence and corruption are rivaled only by its contempt for the public isn’t a story when endangered cats and dogs, and the New Yorkers who pay through the nose trying to keep them alive, are that lawless agency’s victims.

Reporters and editors ignore ACC and its decades of malfeasance because they don’t consider state-sponsored torture or kill quotas to be newsworthy, they believe the subject matter beneath them, or both — the occasional tragedy porn piece, always good for clicks, excepted.

During Dr. Martin’s first week on the job, he and Mayor Mamdani stood by as DOH and ACC continued to terrorize New Yorkers they promised to help.

From New Yorkers who could only watch in horror as DOH and ACC slaughtered another family pet, though she had a new home waiting …

… to New Yorkers whose pets were (1) evicted from NYCHA housing and (2) exterminated, rather than rehomed, by DOH and ACC.

The Scoop New York queried Martin and, for the third time, Mamdani concerning DOH, ACC, and the burden the agencies place upon everyday New Yorkers, every day. There was no reply.

Imagine that. Same as it ever was.

Here’s the latest New York companion animal news:

• You can love companion animals or you can love watching their adoptive families terrorized by the government, but not both.

• New York Democrats are convention-ing this weekend in Syracuse, where they will try to present a united front led by incumbent Governor Kathy “Show Me the Money!” Hochul, who has an Antonio Delgado problem she’d just as soon not call attention to.

• Related: Ahead of the convention and well before the June primary, Zohran Mamdani endorsed Hochul, who you may recall weathervaned for three months last year before indicating support for her party’s nominee to lead the country’s largest city.

• Related: A short distance and worlds away from the convention site, a full-blown crisis has erupted at Central New York SPCA, where the entire board resigned after shelter staff and advocates complained about poor leadership. (TSNY will have full coverage of the CNY SPCA shake-up in the coming weeks.)

• The indefatigable Shelter Reform Action Committee posted its report on last month’s NYC ACC board meeting: “[T]here's no surer way to be kicked off the Board than to challenge the DOH.”

• As the city braces for another bout of lethally cold weather, NYC has five boroughs and three city homeless shelters that allow pets.

• State officials reported five cases of bird flu, which can sicken and kill pets, in Suffolk County.

• Three years later, Rochester Mayor Malik Evans still can’t find a competent veterinarian willing to work for his janky-ass kill pound.

• A Cheektowaga rescue is shutting its mall storefront because it can no longer afford to keep it. Thanks, Kathy!

• As part of a wrist-tap arrangement with the defendant, Westchester County DA Susan Cacace is set to drop all charges against a Bedford rescue operator accused of multiple instances of animal cruelty.

• “This was not a delusional ‘rescuer’ convinced no one else could care for the animals. This was a commercial operation.”

• This is terrible. Ditto this.

• A dangerously ignorant “journalist” (“Should pit bulls even be allowed to be pets?”) interviewed a NY “dog bite attorney” who should know better (“There are certain breeds of dogs with different levels of aggression.”) for what scans as sponsored content but was not labeled as such.

• Finally: Dunno which NYC ACC this reporter visited for this feel-good story, but she should try stopping by when shit gets real.

Food recalls

FDA announced no pet food recalls this week.

Check here for more info on FDA-announced recalls, and here for details on prior FDA advisories and outbreaks.

Share

Headlines from Buffalo to Brooklyn

It’s January 31, 2026. This is The Weekly Poop.

This week, The Scoop New York got word that Town of Hempstead Animal Shelter — historically a nexus of corruption notorious for abusing animals and New Yorkers alike — hired a longtime vocal critic to make recommendations on how to improve conditions there.

You may remember TOHAS from such iniquities as the sadistic killing of Butchy hours before he was to go to a rescue. And the attempted extermination of Titan, one of many dogs at TOHAS to be summarily sentenced to solitary confinement — banished indefinitely to a small cage isolated from humans and other dogs. And the detention of Buster Brown, who escaped with his life after languishing in the TOHAS hole for months.

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Diane Madden, of East Meadow, was one of three volunteers who in 2013 won a lawsuit against TOH for banning them from TOHAS in retaliation for voicing concerns about problems at the “shelter,” which also serves as a patronage mill in a town where electeds never die, they just get six-figure no-show jobs via backroom deals that reward cronyism and disenfranchise the public.

Not satisfied with ordering the plaintiffs away from TOHAS, Hempstead officials slandered them for good measure, according to the 2013 suit.

The 2013 judgment required TOHAS to implement reforms that were eventually abandoned in favor of a return to the status quo, Madden told TSNY last year. Sure enough, last summer brought three more suits filed by TOHAS volunteers who say they, too, were excommunicated for calling attention to animal neglect and abuse.

TOH dialed up the turpitude to 11 this go-round, banning TOHAS volunteers from all town properties under threat of criminal prosecution.

With ensconced Republican leaders wilding out like Boss Hogg on angel dust, last year’s race for TOH supervisor was competitive and contentious. In August, erstwhile Nassau County legislator John Ferretti was installed as Hempstead supervisor, elevating himself to incumbency with a little help from his friends, who coordinated a smash-and-power grab that the courts are hashing out to this day.

In November, Ferretti defeated Democrat Joe Scianablo after a campaign that saw the three-month incumbent cynically exploit the Hempstead kill pound, and at least one terrified cat, to secure 53 percent of the vote.

Once sworn in to a full term, one of the first things Ferretti did was announce that dogs at TOHAS would no longer be allowed off the premises. Locals were not impressed.

“I think it’s the closest thing to normalcy that these animals — so many abused, neglected, abandoned — have, so I hope you didn’t take that away,” Marsha DiTieri, of Merrick, testified at this year’s first TOH board meeting, in early January.

From Patch:

Hempstead resident Diane Madden was the final commenter, who called restrictions on public access to the animal shelter a first-amendment issue, citing "70 years" of precedent wherein town residents could access the shelter with fewer restrictions.

It is well-established that New York kill pounds value Constitutional rights like they value the well-being of abused, neglected and abandoned cats and dogs. Ferretti unilaterally imposed restrictions on public engagement with dogs at TOHAS not because those dogs suddenly pose a grave danger to the populace, as Ferretti apparently managed to proclaim without ROFL, but because his disdain for animals at his kill pound is matched by contempt for constituents who care about them, as demonstrated by the bloodless putsch that got him the supervisor gig in the first place.

That said, speaking to TSNY this week, Madden said Ferretti reached out after the board meeting with an offer to “put [their] differences aside.” What resulted was a consultancy contract good for 90 days — the time frame was Madden’s call — during which time Ferretti has pledged Madden “direct access” to TOHAS and the supervisor himself.

Throughout the three-month period, which officially begins tomorrow, Madden is tasked with seeking out and recommending outside experts in behavior, rescue and rehoming, among other areas. “Anything that improves the lives of animals,” she told me.

According to Madden, Ferretti acceded to her every condition, including access to TOHAS records, and kennels now shut to the public.

“My goal is to get my foot in the door to get many feet in the door,” said Madden. “I will continue to try to persuade him to open those kennels.”

With 25 years of advocacy under her belt, Madden is well aware that some will question Ferretti’s motives, and hers as well.

As far as what Ferretti hopes to gain from their agreement, she said, “That’s between him and God.”

“I know what my agenda is,” she continued, “and I know what results I’m looking for.”

To that end, Madden stressed that she is “most grateful” to Ferretti and the TOH board, which approved her contract with an unanimous vote.

“At the end of the day, it’s their decision,” said Madden. “And that opens the door to the good possibility that things will improve.”

Here’s the latest New York companion animal news:

• You can love companion animals or you can love watching their adoptive families kidnapped, disappeared, abducted and assassinated by the government, but not both.

• Facing a budget shortfall left by Eric Adams, NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani is again calling on Albany to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthiest New Yorkers, a wildly popular idea among the hoi polloi that is opposed by millionaire Governor Kathy Hochul (before she eventually flip-flops and pretends it was her plan all along).

• Speaking of budgets, shortfalls and piss-poor governance, Humane Society of Schuyler County successfully begged ASPCA for funds to help the facility comply with Hochul’s unfunded shelter standards mandate, which took effect in December.

• Curtis Sliwa literally went toe to toe with an alleged creep who wants “his” dogs back though he is set to go to trial, in Queens, for allegedly binding one of them with duct tape. Respect!

• Speaking of creeps, the owners of an unnamed Brooklyn smoke shop don’t deserve Jimmy and if New York had adequate cruelty laws would be barred from having animals altogether.

• Related: A Buffalo man got probation for fracturing the skull of a senior chihuahua, while an alleged POS in Suffolk County was charged with misdemeanor cruelty after authorities say he “repeatedly punched” his 4-yo German Shepherd “with a closed fist … while holding the animal down on the ground, as [he] struggled to get up, yelping in pain.”

• Rescuers have placed hundreds of rats saved from a now-condemned Long Island house, but still need help finding homes for hundreds more.

• NYC ACC started a short-term foster program for dogs because, according to ACC, “[e]ven a short break from the shelter lowers stress” and “dogs show their true personalities outside the shelter” — further proof that ACC exterminates dogs for “behavior” ACC knows is caused by hellish conditions at ACC.

• If you live in select Brooklyn ZIP codes and need free assistance caring for your cat or dog, Flatbush Cats is offering.

• Finally: Godspeed, Mr. Galarza and Casi.

Food recalls

FDA announced no pet food recalls this week.

Check here for more info on FDA-announced recalls, and here for details on prior FDA advisories and outbreaks.

Share

Headlines from Buffalo to Brooklyn

It’s January 24, 2026. This is The Weekly Poop.

This week, a dark cloud lingered over NYC DOH land.

Not the ash cloud bearing the cremains of tens of thousands of past and future family pets happily destroyed by Chief Extermination Officer Risa Weinstock and her even-lesser DOH dunderlings at NYC ACC. Au contraire, mindless deadly violence visited upon the city’s most vulnerable is the very air they breathe over at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene [sic]. Given the choice, they prefer it.

What they don’t like at DOH, apparently, is uncertainty. And DOH big shots are getting a rancid taste of the fear they so love to dish out courtesy of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who reportedly isn’t high on his inherited acting health commish, Dr. Michelle Morse.

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From Politico:

Sources familiar with the current state of play tell Playbook that Mamdani has for months been weighing replacing Morse, with an interview process ongoing. But the wait for a decision from the mayor has prompted some unease inside the agency, according to a city government source, who was granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.

Yes, yes. Go on.

Mary Bassett, who served as city health commissioner under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, has been under consideration by Mamdani, three sources close to the mayor’s transition said. Morse is also actively campaigning to keep her job, but it wasn’t clear Thursday who’s most likely to get it.

And so we meet again, Dr. Bassett.

I don’t have to tell you that, in 4.5 years as de Blasio’s DOH commissioner, Bassett did nothing to improve conditions at NYC ACC. She moved on to Harvard, as one does, before Governor Kathy Hochul named her state health commish, in late 2021. Bassett resigned her NYS post 13 months later to return to Harvard, whence she was recently ejected because daddy said so.

As Mamdani reportedly mulled mounting yet another de Blasio retread, DOH/ACC was busy not-busy orchestrating the biannual dog and pony show that is the ACC board meeting.

Per usual, this week’s performance was conducted by board chair Patrick Nolan, who schmoozes as an executive at Penguin Books when he isn’t overseeing the obliteration of 40,000+ healthy and adoptable cats and dogs, as Nolan has since he assumed the position days after Barack Obama officially renewed his lease on 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. For you youts, that’d be all the way back in January 2013 — the apex of Post-Racial America. Lulz.

Unless you had the time, money and physical ability to make the trip to ACC’s shithole Queens outpost, you didn’t see this week’s ACC board meeting. Just as you have never seen any ACC board meeting unless you blocked out the hours and forked over the resources to bear witness to Nolan and company’s dirty business in the flesh. Because in the year 2026, DOH’s ACC, unlike every other government entity on the planet, doesn’t livestream its public meetings, where New Yorkers can most conveniently see and participate in them. Because ACC is so corrupt that its minders at the nation’s largest, most self-important municipal health department flagrantly discriminate against their own constituents — poor, disabled and/or elderly New Yorkers, especially — to keep them in the dark about what happens at the city kill pound and, ergo, prevent them from effecting long-overdue reforms.

Except: DOH did have ACC stream board meetings, public comments and all, during COVID. When I asked ACC designated liar Katy Hansen why the board doesn’t stream meetings post-COVID, Hansen said “we” “prefer” to hold meetings “in person.” As if what staffers for a public agency funded with public ducats prefer to reveal to that public has fuck-all to do with anything.

Reality check for Hansen et al.: Nobody gives a shit what you prefer. This ain’t Melville. You ain’t Bartleby.

From freshman English lit — they don’t hand out BAs at UNC Greensboro for no reason — we segue back to the star of his own show, and yours, too: Mr. 40K his splendid self.

Minutes into the Wednesday proceedings, the Honorable Mr. Nolan thusly pre-admonished the handful of New Yorkers who had the audacity to overcome every DOH/ACC trap door and trip wire to be there:

We limit you to two minutes. That’s enough time to make a statement, ask a question or two. Please honor that and also be civil. Anyone who I consider to be uncivil we’ll have to just ask you to stop, and we’ll actually end the public comment section. So don’t ruin it for everyone.

I think being civil here is an easy bar.

This guy, amirite?

Stuff happened at the board meeting. Nothing happened at the board meeting. DOH and ACC staffers told a buncha lies and rattled off a buncha unvetted and therefore useless data. The NYPD board rep called in sick, as NYPD reps regardless of venue can be counted on to do, when they deign to call in at all. The Parks rep was also a no-show. As was a newly-appointed member who skipped his first meeting. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Nolan warned the room that he considers two (unnamed) nominees offered for Mayor Mamdani’s consideration to be “excellent candidates,” meaning DOH upended some rocks to round out the roster with more pro-kill worms who have tacitly or explicitly agreed to abuse New Yorkers every chance they get, just the way DOH, ACC and Patrick Nolan like ‘em.

All in all, then, it was a typical meeting of the NYC DOH ACC board.

It is past time for this twisted spectacle to end. Relieving Patrick Nolan of his high hobby horse would be a good start.

Nolan’s role in the City Hall/City Council/DOH/ACC kayfabe hierarchy is to bully New Yorkers who dare question how the city is spending their money. To slap down New Yorkers who have the chutzpah to politely request that the city stop torturing and killing the animals they’re paid to protect. It’s a job for bottom-feeders, and it’s one Nolan clearly relishes.

Because Patrick Nolan is full of his own medicine. He’s a self-serious buffoon. A caricature. A type. The crusty college dean who gets the starch taken out of his shorts at the end of every bad 1980s frat movie. A malevolent clown who unwittingly or not presents as a professional starfucker eternally thirsty for unearned adulation.

I sent Nolan a list of questions this week. Here they are:

That there was no response, same as every prior attempt, is a given. Because like every bully, from playground punk to tin-pot dictator (and tin-pot dictator wannabe, ahem), Patrick Nolan is above all a coward.

While he has no qualms helping DOH and ACC maliciously disenfranchise New Yorkers, no problem shouting down those New Yorkers in public, Nolan isn’t about to step face to face with someone who gives zero Fs about his position or marrow-deep sense of entitlement.

There is nothing “civil” about pissing on people while insisting, snottily, that it’s raining. Nothing civil about coercion, squelching dissent, ageism, ableism, classism, or generally being a pompous prick to people you know won’t push back. Nothing civil about telling lies on behalf of other liars. Needless to say, there is no evidence of a single civilized act occurring behind closed doors at DOH’s ACC for more than 30 years.

Nolan is a tired act way beyond its expiry date. He is the past. The bad old days. His narcissism and insatiable desire to be one of the beautiful people won’t allow him to step aside, and DOH bigs aren’t about to replace their enforcer, Nolan being every bit as broken and grotesque as they are.

But if Mamdani is what he claims to be, he will read Nolan like a book, and finally ship him off. With the remainders. Where he belongs. Where he has always belonged.

Here’s the latest New York companion animal news:

• You can love companion animals or you can love watching their adoptive families terrorized by the government, but not both.

• “Affordability” Governor Kathy “Affordability” Hochul officially announced her $260B plan to do jack to help NYers who pay out of pocket to do her job for her and screw over those who suffer life-altering injuries at the hands of reckless drivers because it’s what her paymasters want.

• Why not throw another log on the Kathy Hochul Is Corrupt as She Is Inept fire. Plenty to go around.

• Promising “fulsome oversight,” NYC Council Speaker Julie Menin told reporter Errol Louis to expect council hearings regarding Eric Adams-era “no-bid contracts … given out to various entities with little to no scrutiny.” If you’re going fulsome on sweetheart no-bid handouts issued by corrupt ex-mayors, madame speaker, go the full fulsome.

• Authorities in Yonkers are looking for the individual(s) who last November slit a dog’s throat and left him to die near Oakland Cemetery. (The dog, named Frankie by rescuers, is recovering.)

• An Erie County vet who facilitated the theft of a family pet pled guilty to falsifying business records (Class A misdemeanor) and companion animal stealing (unclassified misdemeanor) and will get a wrist tap because as a UM stealing a pet is barely a crime in New York State.

• As of this writing, Suffolk County prosecutors have charged this alleged serial abuser with one count of misdemeanor animal torturing, according to court records reviewed by yours truly.

• Speaking of thievery and animal abuse: ASPCA tossed some of its ill-gotten resources toward what it says is a recovery center for abused dogs, in Pawling. Tell it to Oreo. Dirty sticky-fingered chuds.

• State troopers pulled a woman and her dog from an icy canal in Little Falls, in Herkimer County.

• Finally, it’s a 12-yo piece, but "dogs preferred to excrete with the body aligned along the north–south axis" is what we in the biz call evergreen.

Food recalls

FDA announced no pet food recalls this week.

Check here for more info on FDA-announced recalls, and here for details on prior FDA advisories and outbreaks.

Share

The Scoop New York is the only news outlet tracking high-kill NYC ACC extermination data, because TSNY is the only outlet to consider newsworthy state-sanctioned, taxpayer-funded cruelty toward homeless companion animals, as well as decades of officials’ deliberate abuse — psychological, physical and financial — of the New Yorkers who care about them.

Paid subs and donations — tax-deductible as allowed by law — make it possible for The Scoop New York to investigate and expose kill-pound corruption statewide. Tap or click here to donate or subscribe. Thank you.

Animal Care Centers of New York City exterminated 2,401 cats and dogs the first nine months of 2025, according to NYC ACC data.

The total number of killings rose 7 percent compared to the first three quarters of 2024, when ACC exterminated 2,245 cats and dogs.

The average rate of ACC cat and dog killings combined through the third quarter — 267 cats and dogs per month — was 8 percent higher than 2024’s average rate of 246 total exterminations per month.

December figures are not yet available, as ACC releases “outcome” data reports well after month’s end. But if ACC continued killing at the same pace through the fourth quarter, 2025 would have the highest combined average exterminations per month since COVID.

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Headlines from Buffalo to Brooklyn

It’s January 17, 2026. This is The Weekly Poop.

This week — this month, this year, this decade, this century, this millennium — the state of New York companion animal welfare is dire.

If it’s January in New York, where like it or lump it every year is an election year, pols from Lake Erie to Long Island Sound are taking oaths and talking shit, of the horse and bull variety.

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At the top of the 2026 ticket: Governor Kathy Hochul, who within the span of 10 years managed to fail upward from lowly county clerk known for gleefully plotting to ambush and deport immigrants, ICE-style, all the way to headlining The Egg, with a U.S. House stint in between for good measure. This despite possessing the political chops of a real-life Chauncey Gardiner and no discernible closely-held beliefs or values beyond “Go Bills!”.

Scared shitless by the 60-40 Electoral College ruling that decided Trump v. Harris, Hochul was hawking affordability months before Andrew “Mandami” Cuomo had his creepy racist ass handed to him by now-NYC mayor née-NYS Assembly member Zohran Mamdani. And though she was characteristically late to catch on, after the requisite weathervaning period the governor concluded that, yes, the million vote-getting international phenom connected with voters in a manner she could safely exploit.

And there they are, clasping hands beneath that headline. Felix and Oscar. Mozart and Salieri. Mixed pickle and mayonnaise.

We won’t get into the specifics of their respective “affordability” plans here. Coverage elsewhere is plentiful, and Mamdani’s stated goals are well-known, seeing as they got him them million votes.

Hochul says she’s on board with universal child care, but her aversion to properly taxing wealthy folk like herself is a hard cap that keeps her from going much further. Which is how you end up with Cuomo-esque bait-and-switch backfill like Hochul’s plot to reduce car insurance premiums by screwing over crash victims — at the behest of fucking Uber, naturally.

Kathy Hochul identifies with privilege. She would much rather hang in the Pegulas’ skybox than raise the Pegulas’ taxes to benefit the New Yorkers she forced to subsidize that skybox. Handouts for me and mine; hand it over for thee and thine. It’s no more complicated than that.

Suffice to say the affordability agendas presented by Hochul and Mamdani do not acknowledge or include countless New Yorkers handing it over hand over fist, every day, to care for New York’s homeless cats and dogs. Both the governor and the mayor are, like their predecessors, blind to that struggle. This is a choice.

Ditto the New York Legislature and New York City Council, which are meant to serve as a check on the executives but do so only inasmuch as electeds’ mutual interests allow — said mutual interest in this case being preservation of The Big Lie, which allows cynical electeds to point to fictitious live release rates as evidence of their status as Friends Of The Animals.

That’s how you get a City Council speaker who talks “affordability” while, say, reappointing indifferent, ineffectual seat-warmers like chief council FOTA Lynn “AcC dOEs ThE beST It cAn” Schulman to the council’s ACC oversight post, which also happened this week.

Leftist, centrist or conservative; Democrat or Republican; socialist or capitalist; mixed pickle or mayo: Flipping the bird at New Yorkers with unaffordable unpaid government jobs is The One Thing They Agree On.

Here’s the latest New York companion animal news:

• You can love companion animals or you can love watching their adoptive families terrorized by the government, but not both.

• Our buddy Patrick “40K” Nolan is skedded to smirk and condescend and bully his way through another pointless ACC board meeting next Wednesday, January 21, in the purposely too-small meeting room at the purposely transit-remote FOTA St. Paul A. Vallone Puppy-Kitten Carcass Factory in Queens — unless TSNY noting the meeting leads DOH to cancel it. Wouldn’t be the first time.

• Check here, here and here for more on Governor Hochul’s state of the state production and fake-it-to-make-it plans ahead of the primary (where she has opposition) and the general election.

• City & State welcomed incoming New York City Council members with a big access-o-press smooch. Because we’re all friends here, dontcha know.

• Meet Helen Arteaga Landaverde, Mamdani’s deputy mayor assigned to supervise his still-unnamed health commissioner.

• “I plan to be an extremely activist comptroller, including on the budget,” said Mark Levine, newly-inaugurated NYC comptroller who as City Council health chair did zilch to challenge Bill de Blasio’s $1.4B ACC contract boondoggle.

• What fresh horrors await helpless cats in the custody of NYC ACC and its gee-whiz AI cat pain detector?

• Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple somehow did NOT issue a cruelty charge against an Albany woman accused of dumping a dog outside Mohawk Hudson Humane Society, where the dog froze to death.

• “The investigation found that Betar urged its members to bring weapons to protests, including pepper spray and knives, as well as pit bulls, according to the AG.”

• Finally, New York City in 1826 1926 2026, everyone.

Food recalls

FDA announced no pet food recalls this week.

Check here for more info on FDA-announced recalls, and here for details on prior FDA advisories and outbreaks.

Share

Headlines from Buffalo to Brooklyn

It’s January 10, 2026. This is The Weekly Poop.

This week, New York Assembly Member Donna Lupardo announced she will not run for another term this year.

As regular TSNY readers know, Lupardo chairs the Assembly agriculture committee, which along with the Senate ag committee determines the fate of almost every companion animal-related bill in Albany. A Democrat based in Binghamton, Lupardo is known to New Yorkers as perhaps the single biggest obstacle to animal-friendly legislation in the state.

Biggest obstacle perhaps runner-up? Michelle Hinchey, Democrat from Kingston and Lupardo’s counterpart in the New York Senate.

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Lupardo and Hinchey’s most consequential dereliction of duty in the companion animal space is joint opposition to the Shelter Animal Rescue Act, which would require New York kill pounds to offer death row cats and dogs to qualified rescues, rather than exterminating them.

SARA is revenue-neutral — it would cost taxpayers $0 — and should have been a slam dunk when it was introduced in 2021. It died because, rather than listen to New Yorkers who devote their wallets, purses and pocketbooks, along with most of their waking hours, to saving animals from kill pounds, Lupardo and Hinchey et al. obeyed the pounds and their enablers, all of whom have a personal interest in maintaining the status quo.

SARA opponents include the “shelter” personnel lobbyists/lawmaker patrons at New York State Animal Protection Federation and, naturally, the long-conners at ASPCA and Humane Society of the United States, which now calls itself “Humane World for Animals,” ‘cuz you gotta diversify these days and those high six- to seven-figure C-suite salaries and phat retirement plans and other gold-plated bennies ain’t gonna fund themselves now are they.

Lupardo will be shuffling papers in Albany for another year. Meantime, thanks to Lupardo & Hinchey’s refusal to support SARA, The Greatest Kill Pound in the World has the all-clear to abuse and torture and exterminate as many cats and dogs as necessary to satisfy the kill quota they set for themselves to avoid doing their actual jobs, insulated all the while by lies fed to New Yorkers via complicit, culpable media.

Ten days into his term, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has yet to name his health commissioner, a curious development that temp commish Dr. Michelle Morse — to the extent she thinks about ACC at all — must figure is unrelated to the ongoing scandal that is the abattoir she supervises, since her ACC goon squad spent the holidays as they abnormally do: inflicting suffering and death upon literal puppies and kittens in exchange for money, as terrorized New Yorkers look on.

So apparently confident is Morse that the political posturing part of her job will render irrelevant the perpetual bloody horror she permits at ACC (again, to the extent she thinks about it at all) that the first known “care center” extermination of 2026 was a spay-neuter-kill victim.

In addition to poor Tyrone — admitted, cut open by sawbones DVMs (if not aspiring-sawbones vet techs), overdosed with human-grade sedatives, poisoned until dead — over the past few weeks DOH/ACC put to death the following dogs they were entrusted to care for:

• Christmas: Dumped by owner three times, at ACC 20 days before extermination

• Arrow: Described by volunteer as “utterly adorable”; exterminated after 25 days

• Pepper: Admitted with sibling Brownstone; exterminated after 18 days

• Tiberius: Admitted to ACC with facial wound; exterminated after 25 days

• August: Found with wounds and lacerations, tied up with Arden (also on the kill list until he got a foster); exterminated on day 13

• Brownstone: Admitted with sibling Pepper; exterminated after three weeks

• Jazzy J: Year-old “beautiful boy”; sickened with kennel cough and diarrhea; exterminated

• Phoenix: “super sweet,” “loves to cuddle”; lived with a child and two other dogs; loves “baths and car rides”; exterminated after 18 days

• Peanut Butter: 6 years old; “friendly,” “loves his squeaky toys” so much ACC declared it a behavior issue; exterminated

• Jovie: “Spirited,” “smart”; exterminated after nine days

• Baklava: “gentle,” “affectionate,” “an angel”; exterminated

• Sasha: 1 year-old puppy; exterminated after 19 days

• Bunnyrabbit: “Emaciated [with] muscle loss”; exterminated after 4 weeks because ACC “didn’t like that he wouldn’t stop jumping up for treats”

• Bennett: “Highly fearful,” “wants love and security,” “is ready to trust”; exterminated after three weeks

• Bruce: “Had enlarged lymph node, diarrhea, CIRDC [kennel cough] that turned to pneumonia”; exterminated after 19 days

• Barker T: Admitted when owner died; exterminated after 23 days

• Murph: “Abandoned,” “entered [ACC] nervous but [with] wagging tail,” “social,” “leans in for pets,” “LOVES toys”; exterminated

• Sargento: 1 year-old puppy; “volunteer favorite,” “everyone’s dream boy”; exterminated

• Zo Juniore: Abandoned by family who left the country; “friendly, active and playful,” “loves bath time [and] chasing tennis balls”; exterminated after three weeks

• Bingo: 1 year-old puppy; neutered despite CIRDC suspected in pre-op exam, “then put in ISO for CIRDC”; “Trazadone on intake despite owner saying no behavior issues”; exterminated

• Mudpuppy: “Playful,” “high energy,” “exuberant”; exterminated after four weeks

• Bushdog: 1 year-old puppy; “owner called police because of a nip to arm”; intake 12/12, administered 200MG Trazodone; neutered 12/19; exterminated 1/10

• Yasuke: 1 year-old puppy; adopted from ACC, found four days later as a stray; “friendly,” “smart,” “radiates happy energy,” “eager to connect”; exterminated after 26 days

As you can see, at DOH’s ACC “the banality of evil” is not just an expression. It’s a lifestyle.

Someday, as soon as the TSNY balance sheet allows, we’ll go deep on DOH/ACC’s cat victims, largely neglected on TSNY due to the laws of physics and constraints of space and time, and who by all accounts have it worse than the dogs.

Until then, if you’re a constituent, Mamdani says he would like to hear from you. You know what to do.

Here’s the latest New York companion animal news:

• You can love companion animals or you can love watching their adoptive families terrorized and shot down in cold blood by the government, but not both.

• State legislators are back in Albany as Governor Kathy Hochul and her declared election opponents prepare for a year of vomiting “affordability” propaganda while doing actually nothing for the well-being of companion animals or the New Yorkers who bankroll their care statewide.

• Related: Same garbage, different pile.

• “Mamdani on Friday announced a new office of ‘mass engagement’ that he said would seek input from New Yorkers and shape his administration’s policies.” Guess we’ll see won’t we.

• New York Focus dropped a bombshell report on state regulators willfully ignoring FBI “evidence on horse racing’s largest doping ring,” and what do you know: New York lawmakers are in on it.

• We can think of a few reasons why Town of Hempstead Supervisor John Ferretti would prohibit dogs at his corrupt TOHAS kill pound from leaving the premises — ever — and “protecting the public” or whatever flatulence Ferretti excreted from his face hole isn’t one of them.

• Before moving on to his next grift Eric Adams issued an executive order requiring horse carriage operators to have horses examined by a veterinarian or else lose their license to work them to death.

• Flatbush Cats produced a podcast about “urban crises and their relationship to cats on the street.”

• DOH/ACC and the drooling dipshits who run every other NY kill pound are surely inoculating their charges against dog flu, since withholding veterinary care would be rank animal cruelty of the sort that never happens here.

• Finally, Strong Island Animal Rescue badasses saved dozens of domesticated rats from a Rocky Point home and needs assistance from “experienced rat rescues” and goddamn if I don’t love me some New York.

Food recalls

FDA recently announced two pet food recalls:

• Gold Star Distribution, Inc., “multiple brand names” [salmonella, “presence of rodent and avian contamination and insanitary conditions during the storage process”]

• Country Vet Biscuits for Dogs [salmonella]

Check here for more info on FDA-announced recalls, and here for details on prior FDA advisories and outbreaks.

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The Weekly Poop will return next week. The following is an open letter to freshly-inaugurated New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, posted on behalf of New Yorkers who toil as an unpaid labor force for Animal Care Centers of New York City and its complicit supervisors at the city health department.

Dear Mayor Mamdani,

First, congratulations on your successful underdog campaign and decisive victory. Before taking the oath, then taking the oath again, you had already notched at least one momentous win: sparing New Yorkers from yet another four grim years of misogynist, bigoted, senior citizen-killing, NYC-hating Andrew Cuomo and his über-toxic strain of handsy ratfuckery.

I’m posting this letter to alert you to a serious, long-overlooked issue that negatively impacts the lives of countless New Yorkers every day. It’s a problem you inherited, like so many others, but if your “affordability” rhetoric is more than rhetoric, it’s one you will want to address, and soon, as New Yorkers are suffering its effects — physical and psychological, as well as financial — even as we speak. In fact, the pain caused by this issue never subsides, and has never subsided, for more than 30 years.

Before we get to that, though, please have a look at this:

This is a screen grab from one of your campaign ads. I was an editor and reporter at Streetsblog for 11 years. During that time, we helped the city get stuff done — projects including the launch of Citi Bike and pedestrianizing Times Square. We were also the only publication in the city to unequivocally (and aggressively) endorse congestion pricing back in the aughts, before Speaker Sheldon Silver and Assembly Democrats spiked it.

If you consider my reporting sound enough to cite to attract voters, I hope and trust you will do your constituents who inspired this letter the courtesy of reading to the end. Believe me: I will be as brief as I can.

In 1995, the Giuliani administration established a non-profit, now known as Animal Care Centers of New York City, to take over city animal control duties from ASPCA. Since City Hall then and now perceives domesticated animals primarily as potential patient zeroes biding their time before they kill us all, ACC was placed under control of the city health department.

On paper, ACC is supposed to be an open-admission animal shelter, meaning it accepts all intakes. It is on paper supposed to serve as a respite for New Yorkers in dire need of help keeping their pets, many if not most of whom are considered family, in times of difficulty. When New Yorkers lose their apartments, get seriously ill, or can’t afford food or medical care for themselves, much less their pets, ACC is supposed to be a safety net — so accommodating, so warm, that the system will provide care for your beloved pet cat or dog or rabbit or guinea pig on your behalf until you get back on your feet and can be reunited.

For the last three decades, ACC has been no such thing.

Here are excerpts from a story I did for Gothamist in 2018:

In 2013, Scott Stringer, who was then Manhattan borough president, released a report that summarized 18 years of political scheming, legal maneuvering, buck-passing, incompetence, and negligence, all at the expense of animals entrusted to ACC’s care.

In 2015, Comptroller Stringer issued another damning report, which uncovered expired medications administered to animals at ACC, along with vaccines stored in the same refrigerators as food, beverages, and remains.

As you can see, ACC’s longstanding deficiencies are no secret to NYC officialdom. To the contrary, ACC has been “a series of nightmares,” as one New Yorker told me, since its founding. ACC’s atrocious treatment of the animals in its care, however, isn’t the impetus for this letter.

Don’t get me wrong. Being the mayor, obviously you should care that your municipal “animal care centers” are in reality a kill pound system where, for example, New Yorkers with terminal illnesses, deceived by ACC propaganda, take their beloved cats or dogs to be rehomed, only to have the “care center” shortly thereafter kill their family pets instead, for no reason other than discretionary killing is easier than rehoming. That’s it. That’s the reason.

Discretionary killing is common at ACC because, as indicated above, DOH is on board. And because not one elected official in the city or state of New York — Not. One. — notices or much cares one way or another, beyond how they can spin it to ingratiate themselves to the public via faux outrage.

If that anger was sincere rather than performative, The Scoop New York would not exist, and after two years at it I would have more than a handful of responses to hundreds of queries sent to officials at all levels statewide.

As mayor it should matter to you that veterinarians paid by city taxpayers subject homeless cats and dogs to alteration surgery only to kill them during or shortly after recovery — a heinously cruel practice so common it has its own descriptor: spay-neuter-kill.

It should matter to you that ACC veterinarians, with the tacit approval of DOH, dose animals with enough Trazodone and other human-grade sedatives to put them in a compliant stupor upon ACC admission.

It should matter to you that rather than provide treatment, ACC veterinarians routinely put to death cats and dogs who are sick — because they are sick — though most cat and dog illnesses at ACC are contracted there due to chronic incompetent malfeasance.

But as I say, this isn’t about officially-sanctioned open-air animal cruelty perpetrated every day by The Greatest City in the World. It’s about the burdens that ACC and, by extension, its DOH overseers, impose upon New Yorkers in ACC’s orbit and beyond. Willfully. Purposely. Even spitefully.

That video still up top is from the only City Council ACC oversight hearing convened by the health committee in years, before or since. The New Yorkers in bright green “I [cat face] NY” shirts work or volunteer for cat rescues that among other duties serve as the city’s trap-neuter-return apparatus. That’s right: After 30 years in operation, and despite its current 34-year, $1.4B no-bid city contract, ACC has yet to initiate a program to manage the homeless cat population for the nation’s largest city.

Instead, that job is left to the citizenry, both to do the actual work and support that work financially. New Yorkers being New Yorkers, of course, they do not hesitate to help, no matter the cost. But DOH and ACC offloading care for street cats onto the public is like FDNY leaving high-rise fires to a bucket brigade — if those high-rises also required expensive food and medical care, and the bucket brigaders were forced to abdicate their Constitutional rights by signing an NDA forbidding them from criticizing FDNY in any way, under threat of permanent banishment. Uh-huh.

According to the aforementioned No Kill Advocacy Center, a well-run no-kill shelter depends on rescues to handle about 20 percent of its intakes. ACC is obviously neither no-kill nor well-run. As the graph above demonstrates, from 2014 to 2023, only once did ACC adopt out more cats and dogs than it handed off to outside agencies — by 1 percent. This is also fine with DOH.

At that 2024 council hearing, New Yorkers testified for eight hours on the harrowing experience of literally herding cats, who are in constant danger of death or worse, for a city that preaches compassion and delivers shit sandwiches. These New Yorkers, who filled the chamber and then some that day, wept on-mic, begged for city-backed affordable spay-neuter services, and (somehow) spoke calmly about bankruptcy and the prospect of being homeless themselves thanks to their 24/7/365 unpaid city job.

These front-line folk told the council the city needs to fund as many as 200,000 spay-neuter surgeries a year to get a hold on the problem. They were promised action. What they got — a year later — was a pilot at one clinic in one borough, to fund 3,500 alterations, or less than 2 percent of the number of city-paid procedures rescuers estimate are required annually.

I have not broached the fact that ACC routinely shuts to public intakes — the most recent meltdown, last summer, lasted more than a month — in violation of its deal with New Yorkers as open admission.

A proper description of the ACC death lottery — a real-life Squid Game, happening right now and always, wherein countless New Yorkers (along with others around the world) scramble to find safe harbor for cats and dogs ACC is threatening to kill on the spot — would require its own letter.

But if you’ve read this far, you get the picture.

“We may not always succeed,” you said this week, “but never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try.”

Millions of New Yorkers will hold you to those words — a prospect that, to your credit, appears to delight you. As you begin the work, please don’t forget those among their number who devote their very existences to a bloody, costly, gut-wrenching and thankless fight that the city has for 30 years shown no serious interest in taking on, in spite of its clear obligation to the public and counter to basic human morality.

If you choose to forget that fight — if you choose erasure for the New Yorkers who are right now busting ass on your behalf across the boroughs, just like your predecessors did — we’ll be here to remind you.

Believe me: We forget nothing.

Sincerely,

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Another year is nearly behind us, and while the weather outside may or may not be frightful, the wrenching horror of perpetual cat and dog torture killings never subsides at the non-profit contractor currently known as Animal Care Centers of New York City — nor, of course, within the oh-so hallowed walls of the city kill pound Death Star, a.k.a. the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene [sic].

What can you say about sleestaks who would exterminate a homeless dog named Christmas the week before Christmas, just because they could? And in full view of New Yorkers frantically trying to save him from the DOH/ACC death chamber, just because they could?

With mangled typing hand now on the mend, The Scoop New York has many hunt-and-pecked words on deck for ACC and its complicit “overseers” at DOH and City Hall, including mayor-in-waiting Zohran Mamdani, who will inherit the whole fecal enchilada in just a few hours.

To this point Mayor Affordability has repeatedly indicated he has no plans to dispel The Big Lie and no interest in explaining his position to the New Yorkers being driven to destitution or worse by the health department he’s about to be in charge of. Au contraire, at this writing three days prior to inauguration, Mamdani has yet to name his health commissioner, though Eric Adams’ temp commish Dr. Michelle Morse has reportedly put in for the job.

It is well-established that Dr. [x when x = La-De-Da, MD] and The Exterminators don’t want New Yorkers to know what they do all day. In their absence, we can only imagine.

What say we do? Want to? Good!

The Scoop New York is here all week, as DOH and ACC bigs await the new boss. Keep scrolling to support our work.

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The Weekly Poop will return in January, as The Scoop New York upgrades our facilities at TSNY HQ. TSNY will post not-TWP material once a week through December and will be active on social media as time permits.

The original version of this essay was published by JAMESTOWNY, a new Substack from The Scoop New York prime mover Brad Aaron covering Jamestown, New York, and the surrounding area, home to TSNY HQ.

The following version has been tailored for The Scoop New York, and incorporates some material published previously.

See JAMESTOWNY for the unabridged original version of this essay.

“I never thought I’d be here.”

It was the early 10s, the before times, and myself along with a couple other New York City journalists — I personally consider “journalist” a too-precious term for how I make my bones (I have been a reporter since the turn of the century and a reporter/editor since not long afterward; I don’t journal; I have never journaled), but most civilians don’t perceive the difference and (rightly) wouldn’t care if they did and it’s not as clunky as “reporters and editors,” so: “journalists” — were swapping six-word stories on Twitter, with one another and our readers.

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” You know the deal.

I was born and raised in the rural south. My first home was a trailer, as the euphemism “manufactured housing” was not yet invented. It was a single-wide. In a trailer park. Rented.

On this day decades later, at my desk in my apartment in Manhattan (Inwood 4EVR) — possibly the last place I ever imagined I’d visit, much less live — I was an editor and reporter for a non-profit news site focused on urban planning, public transport and related issues. We were the first publication to cover, and the only one to unequivocally endorse, the idea of importing congestion pricing from London to the city, during Mike Bloomberg’s tenure as mayor. We came within a Sheldon Silver of getting it approved in Albany, laying the foundation for its eventual implementation roughly 15 years before the stanchions were finally installed.

We helped marshal public support for the bike-share program that would become Citi Bike, and were the only publication in the city to push for the pedestrianization of Times Square. The tabloids — the Daily News, the New York Post, and probably others — reactionary and change-averse as always, were opposed to all of the above.

We beat the tabs, winning bike-share and helping reclaim Times Square as a place primarily for walking, rather than driving, over the course of four years.

But don’t take my word for it. It’s in the book.

I have worked in media since high school, when I had a part-time job as a 17-year-old “on-air personality” at the AM station in the tiny town where I was born and raised. Getting paid to spin yacht rock 45s every weekday afternoon was hands-down the coolest high school job ever. A noticeable improvement from McDonald’s, where I lasted six weeks. (McDonald’s was my first job, unless you count that day I tried priming tobacco.) Being comfortable around microphones has served me well as a print reporter, as I’m sometimes invited to talk on the radio or, once they became a thing, a podcast about something I’ve covered.

I got into journalism in the 1990s as a freelance music writer (perhaps you recall my review of “Garbage 2.0”), mostly for what used to be called “alternative weeklies.” That term doesn’t mean as much today, not only because news travels instantly on paperless devices we carry in our pockets, but because in many cases the weeklies that managed to stay alive as the internet ate their ad revenue are no longer an “alternative” to much of anything, since the news outlets they historically competed with — a.k.a. Legitimate Media, distinguishable by fear of cuss words and bigger fear of offending the powerful — have gone extinct, or are on life support and will cease to exist the minute the capital ghouls suck the bones dry.

Sometime during college, which I completed as a young adult and finished paying for in middle age, I turned to news reporting. My first full-time journalism job was for an established weekly in a southern college town made famous by football and the local music scene, maybe or maybe not in that order, depending on who’s doing the telling.

As a news reporter and editor at an alternative weekly in the Y2K era, I was obligated to throw stones at the local Legitimate Newspaper, which upon my arrival was still printing two daily editions (!) for a town of about 100,000 people.

Even so, the daily was owned by a corporation in another city, and its button-down access-addled editors were out of touch with much of the town’s populace of students and professors.

I had a popular editorial column, and I pummeled the daily relentlessly. In the process the weekly helped get a bunch of municipal candidates elected — people the daily did not endorse, including a new mayor.

But the joke was on me. What I didn’t know yet was that once a person gets elected, they become an elected. And once on the inside, party notwithstanding, their top concern is remaining there, regardless of what they promised before getting their hands on the keys. In 20+ years covering politics and politicians, I have encountered but one exception: an elected who did exactly what he said he would do, then noped out after one or two terms (I forget which), just as he said he would. Though he lived here for a time, that person is unfortunately not in New York. (Hi Carl.)

I had been at the weekly only a short while before the daily I would later pummel offered me a job. I was invited to their palatial downtown offices, with conference rooms and unsoiled carpet and everything, for an interview, where it was made clear a reporter position was mine for the asking.

By the time I left that southern college town for NYC years later, I had internalized some lessons. One was to never trust a practicing or would-be politician (hence: no more endorsements). Another was that I was good enough at my job to go “legit” should I so choose.

I never went legit. After Dr. J (my spouse), our four cats and I landed in Manhattan, not knowing a soul, I quickly picked up freelance work. This led to a connection at the Village Voice, legendary progenitor of alt-weeklies everywhere, where I contributed a long-form urban planning feature that hit the streets just as the Voice’s then-owners “laid off” much of the staff, including the editor who assigned me the piece. Thus ended my relationship with the Voice.

For the next 11 years I worked as an editor and reporter for Streetsblog, the aforementioned non-profit site that soon became (and still is, I guess) the most widely-read urban planning news source in the country.

Below is a still from a Zohran Mamdani mayoral campaign ad, from earlier this year. It’s a Streetsblog headline of mine from 2008, pertaining to a Midtown Manhattan city bus project the Bloomberg administration ultimately failed to deliver.

Along with transit, planning and development, I covered traffic crashes. Specifically, collisions that resulted in serious injury or death to city pedestrians and cyclists.

On average, a New York City motor vehicle operator — cab driver, bus driver, NYPD patrol officer, truck driver, delivery worker or commuter — kills someone walking or biking in the boros about every 33 hours.

This includes people fatally struck in ostensibly car-free areas, like sidewalks, parks, greenways, and inside restaurant dining rooms. It does not include crashes that cause non-fatal, permanent life-altering injuries, like TBI and amputations, which in NYC are much more frequent than fatal collisions.

I maintained a database of fatal crashes, with details on attendant criminal court cases, which I reported on in the extremely rare instance a motorist was charged, or even ticketed, for killing someone.

I was the only reporter in the city compiling such data, and it earned me another call from above. When Jill Abramson, the first and as-yet only woman to lead The New York Times as executive editor, wrote about the 2007 collision with a Manhattan box truck driver that changed her life forever, she consulted me on background.

Infants, children, parents, grandparents, grandchildren, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, boyfriends, girlfriends, fiancés, wives, husbands, friends, food delivery workers, college professors, executives, artists, actors, tourists, pets, journalists — no one was immune. This remains the case today.

I used Streetsblog crash data to file regular reports on city traffic fatalities, often including graphs to indicate patterns in what the numbers were telling us. Those DOH/ACC companion animal body counts on The Scoop New York were preceded by Streetsblog data reports on men, women, and children lost to city traffic violence.

I had a Friday column, The Weekly Carnage — the bylines for which were apparently changed by Streetsblog, without my knowledge, when they had an intern or someone delete old images from the posts, as I learned just before typing this sentence. The Weekly Carnage aggregated and summarized the week’s worst traffic crashes, in memoriam to the victims, who were again honored with an annual year-end post.

After I eventually left Streetsblog and went back to freelancing — like my father and his father before him, self-employment is my natural state — I successfully pitched a NYC-centric animal welfare story that (eventually) served as the springboard for The Scoop New York. And here we are.

If not for those regular Streetsblog crash data reports, there would be no TSNY DOH/ACC extermination data analyses. If The Weekly Carnage never exists, neither does NYC ACC KILLS. Just as without Flagpole’s City Dope, there would be no The Weekly Poop.

A word about JAMESTOWNY: I need it. To help preserve my sanity. To allow me to write about subjects that don’t make me want to take a header off the GWB and people who don’t make me wish Pluribus was non-fiction.

Same as what Dr. Morse’s slow horses do all day isn’t normal, neither is reporting on it five days a week. It’s infuriating. It’s horrifying. It’s draining. It’s goddamn exhausting, is what it is.

I am often asked how I do this. There’s nothing special about me. No different from any other normal human person with normal human person morals. It tears (and tears) me up to write this shit as much as it tears (and tears) you up to read it. But what I do is cake compared to the folks on the front lines, including The Scoop New York’s A-team of sources. TSNY is a mere reflection of the horror the advocates in the trenches live every hour of every day.

Yes, a segment of my spine is literal titanium — the business end too, all the way uptown to 207 Street. But I wasn’t born that way.

The Scoop New York is on a day-to-day basis more harrowing than my years at Streetsblog by an order of magnitude. I constantly berate myself over animals I tried to cover but couldn’t. Couldn’t help get them safely away. Because there are too many queued for the gallows for me to address or because they were slaughtered before I knew anything about it or because I took a day off. Breakdowns are not infrequent.

Don’t misunderstand. No one should feel sorry for me. I lead a charmed life, all things considered. I make my own decisions. I got to marry the Kim Wexler of education well before Kim Wexler existed. I’m a middle-aged middle-class middlebrow white man in the god-forsaken United States of America in 2025. I do what I want.

I choose to do this because it needs doing, and because I happen to be a natural-born prolific red-ass. Just the high-toned sonofabitch for the job. (There’s a reference for you, Nolan. Hint: It’s an oldie. First print Viking hardback. No ChatGPT, now.)

And I love my work.

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