An Open Letter to Mayor Mamdani O/B/O NYers Doing NYC DOH's Job
A truly inclusive affordability agenda requires DOH's ACC to relieve strapped New Yorkers taking up its slack. Will Mamdani deliver?
The Scoop New York is a website and newsletter covering the movement for a true no-kill New York State, from BUF to BK. NYC ACC KILLS, published by TSNY, enumerates and memorializes adoptable cats and dogs who were exterminated by Animal Care Centers of New York City.
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.
DOH and ACC offloading care for street cats onto the public is like FDNY leaving high-rise fires to a bucket brigade.
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,
Brilliant. Now, it’s on all of us to remind him every day and in every way we can, that we expect him to have the courage to try.