How to Tell Advocacy From Advocacy*
Hint: It's the perpetual mass slaughter of cats and dogs, and the will — or lack of* — to demand its immediate end.
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 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.
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Note: The Weekly Poop will be off next week, and will return the week of February 23.
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.
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: “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.