Fun and Games at Zohran Mamdani's Family Pet Carcass Factory
There are no adults in the room at NYC ACC. The mayor who promised "greatness" in city governance does not care.
The Scoop New York is a website and newsletter covering the movement for a true no-kill New York, 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.
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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.
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.