Buffalo Animal Shelter Is Slaughtering Dogs en Masse
After pledging "shelter" reforms while campaigning for a full term, Acting Mayor Chris Scanlon is MIA.
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.
Note: This post, originally due to publish last Friday, was delayed due to tech issues. Unfortunately it’s as relevant now as it was then. Please read (and share!) accordingly. Best. — BA
Headlines from Buffalo to Brooklyn
It’s September 22, 2025. This is The Weekly Poop.
This week, we’re back in Buffalo, where dogs at the city animal “shelter” continue to suffer and die from systemic neglect and abuse while local politicians do nothing but talk as Albany does even less.
On September 9, Spectrum News (fka NY1; IYKYK) ran a story, from reporter and reserve anchor Brianne Roesser, on the high number of dog killings at City of Buffalo Animal Shelter. The piece featured photos taken by tipsters showing caged dogs at BAS living in shit, 11 months and one day after the local ABC affiliate documented similar conditions in a story that was accompanied by a viewer discretion warning for “graphic and unsettling” images.
Conditions at BAS are as graphic and unsettling today as they were a year ago, notwithstanding promises for reform showered upon Buffalonians by candidates running for mayor — most notably Chris Scanlon and Sean Ryan. Ryan is noteworthy because he’s a state senator and career politician who won the June Democratic primary and is a virtual lock to be Buffalo’s next mayor. Scanlon is the longtime city lawmaker promoted to acting mayor last fall when incumbent Byron Brown bailed mid-term for a more lucrative government position in New York’s equine abuse industry.
As reported in this space in June, after 19 years as mayor, no one is more responsible for the state of Buffalo’s animal shelter than Byron Brown. Which by no means excuses Scanlon or Ryan.
Scanlon was a Common Council (Buffalonian for “city council”) member and council president who before his ascension to acting mayor helped fellow Democrat Brown scheme and scratch and claw his way to a fifth term by subverting the will of Buffalo’s Democratic voters. Naturally, though he lost the mayoral primary after shivving those he was elected to serve, once the substitute-Byron Brown gig is over, Scanlon will return to his spot on the council. Because what else would New Yorkers expect from a nepo pol who was appointed, rather than elected, to his first public office, based on nothing — as in absolutely not one thing — but his name.
As for Byron Brown Revisited’s likely successor — another elected whose family connections made him whatever he is today — Ryan has held elected office in Albany since 2011. Yet if you Google “Sean Ryan” “Buffalo Animal Shelter” and check the “News” tab, you’ll see his interest in helping the city’s homeless and abandoned cats and dogs stretches all the way back to earlier this year, when Ryan launched his campaign for mayor.
Both candidates laid it on thick while on the trail. Scanlon, however, has since gone into hiding. He made no one available to comment for the latest BAS exposé. Or the one before that, in August. His spot on the public payroll secured (for now) by the miracle of his birth, Buffalo’s acting mayor-slash-once and future council member no longer has to act like he is committed to ending animal cruelty perpetrated by the city on his watch.
Scanlon’s incumbency, of course, is an advantage to Ryan, who has pledged something he calls the “Sean Ryan for Buffalo Animal Shelter Advisory Committee,” described as “a group of independent experts, volunteers, and animal care professionals who will bring transparency, community input, and best practices for caring for our animals back into the process.”
For a running politician, promising the heavens is as natural as blinking: it’s involuntary and constant. Like Scanlon, though, Ryan ignored a pre-primary TSNY query concerning BAS and each candidate’s plans for it. Which it goes without saying is small beans compared to Ryan’s aforementioned 14 years as a state legislator doing what New York legislators do. Or, more accurately, not doing what they don’t do.
The dogs living in waste at Buffalo Animal Shelter are, at least, living. Until BAS, having failed to rehome them, decides their time is up.
Roesser and Spectrum got their hands on BAS intake and outcome data from 2022 through 2024. As illustrated in the mutant Venn diagram above, last year BAS killed more than two of every 10 dogs admitted, for an abysmal live release rate of 78 percent, according to figures published by Spectrum.
To hear the “shelter” tell it, 14 percent of dogs admitted in 2024 were irredeemably “aggressive,” to the point they had to be put down. To believe that, you would also have to believe dogs in Buffalo are very different creatures from dogs who are not in Buffalo.
In 2019, the indefatigable New Jersey Animal Observer analyzed 2018 intake and outcome data from Austin Animal Center in Texas. This was back when Austin ran an actual no-kill facility that served as a model for the rest of the nation, before Austin lost its way and lost its mind.
“Austin Animal Center’s pit bull numbers are especially noteworthy,” the Observer wrote. “Despite taking in 1,930 pit bull like dogs in 2018, Austin Animal Center saved 99 [percent] of these dogs.”
Now, any dog with a drop of pit in him or her is likely to be labeled a “pit bull” by people who both love and hate pit bulls. Hence “pit bull like dogs.” Buffalo Animal Shelter does not love “pit bulls.” But that’s beside the point, since BAS also claims that in 2024 it “euthanized” 91 hopelessly “aggressive” dogs who were not pit bulls, in addition to the 155 “aggressive” “pit bulls” the “shelter” supposedly had no choice but to forcibly remove from this plane.
Feeding into “pit bull” hysteria is a misdirection. Most in corporate media, sad to say, would have left it there, in the “Tsk-tsk whatcha gonna do?” manner that most media handle the companion animal welfare beat. But Roesser dug further, getting BAS to admit that “aggressive” means anything the kill pound wants it to mean:
We asked the City of Buffalo Animal Shelter for their policies and protocols to learn more about how they determine when a dog’s behavior is a reason to put it down and found no guidance on determining when to euthanize a dog. There was a list of aggressive behaviors for volunteers to observe, including snarling, growling, lunging, snapping and biting, as well as some protocols on how to safely handle dogs like that.
And there you have it. No, a shelter in Texas is not intaking a more sedate population of homeless dogs than the “shelter” in New York. No, animal control personnel in Austin do not possess magic de-escalation techniques that animal control personnel in Buffalo are not blessed with.
Here’s how it works in the state’s puppy and kitten extermination capital: A dog enters the system, anxious but otherwise eager to please, like 99 percent of domesticated dogs who have ever lived. After weeks of neglect — “12 hours waiting in piss and shit for five minutes of relief, then back to the piss and shit,” say — the anxiousness is now despair. Weeks turn into months, and that sweet, happy pup from before is a terrified wreck who knows full well she’s in a survival situation, and behaves accordingly. Behaves naturally, in other words. That’s all the excuse a kill pound needs to libel and label her as “aggressive” or “dangerous” and condemn her to death row.
The reason Austin saved 99 percent of intakes in 2018 while Buffalo managed just 78 percent in 2024 is because Buffalo decided to exterminate 20 percent of dogs who came in the door while Austin decided to do the work necessary to achieve no kill. For good measure, Buffalo blamed the dogs for their own exterminations. It’s that simple.
In the 2023 extermination log, Roesser also uncovered that on the morning of September 12, Buffalo Animal Shelter exterminated nine dogs in the span of 12 minutes. “Aggressive” and untrainable every one, if you believe in magic.
“This pattern has been seen several other times over the last three years,” Roesser reported.
BAS told Spectrum the pound doesn’t “euthanize for space.” That’s certainly true in the sense that, minus about 1 percent of intakes, BAS isn’t euthanizing but exterminating. Available data from true no-kill facilities everywhere indicate if Buffalo isn’t killing dogs for space, it’s killing for convenience. Acting Mayor Scanlon is clearly fine with this, but at least one Common Council member isn’t taking BAS’ fantastical body counts at face value.
“When the numbers are shown to me that there’s a disproportionate rate of animals that are coming in and being euthanized, it ultimately leads to everyone’s worst fear and, quite frankly, accusation of our animals being euthanized because there’s not enough space,” Council Member Mitch Nowakowski told Roesser.
Everyone who wants to see can see what’s happening in Buffalo, just as everyone who doesn’t personally benefit from The Big Lie can see what’s happening in Brooklyn. Nowakowski has two years left of his current term. Maybe he can work with the presumed next mayor and his presumed shelter advisory committee. Maybe, as is the habit of every other elected in New York, he is brow-furrowing for the cameras. If we’re having this same conversation a year and hundreds of dead “aggressive” dogs from now, we’ll have our answer.
Meantime, The Scoop New York has queried Scanlon’s office for comment on the most recent Buffalo Animal Shelter scandal(s). In addition, we asked the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets, which oversees animal control facilities statewide, if it was aware of the ongoing shit show in Buffalo. We also asked what purpose current state “shelter” inspections serve, all things considered, and what might change when new shelter standards take effect in December. We will update this post if we hear back.
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Food recalls
The FDA announced no new pet food recalls this week. Check here for info on prior recalls.