NYC ACC Adoption Rates Belie Agency Propaganda. So What?
ACC claims New Yorkers are down on adopting cats and dogs. Agency data reports don't agree — and it's really beside the point.
For months, the contractor currently known as Animal Care Centers of New York City has claimed that its facilities are overcrowded because New Yorkers have lost interest in adopting cats and dogs.
Ten years of NYC ACC data reports say something else.
The Scoop New York analyzed ACC intake and adoption figures from 2014 through the first half of this year. According to ACC’s own data, adoption rates — the number of adoptions relative to the number of animals processed by the system — have rebounded since the pandemic, for both cats and dogs, and remained steady through June 2024.
In 2023, the combined average adoption rate for cats and dogs was its highest since 2019. Last year had the second highest combined average rate of any year since 2014. At 35 percent, the combined average adoption rate was down the first six months of 2024, but was still higher than most years since 2014 (only 2019, 2022 and 2023 surpassed it).
In the first half of this year, the average adoption rate for dogs was 24 percent, or roughly the same as the 2022 annual rate. This year’s adoption rate for cats through June was 45 percent — which if it holds would be the third highest annual rate for cats since 2014. The 35 percent combined average adoption rate is on track to more or less match the 2022 rate.
From 2014 to 2018, adoption rates for dogs were higher than rates for cats. The rates were roughly aligned in 2019. Since then, cat adoptions have outpaced dog adoptions by several points.
Note that the charts may indicate slight variations in data for the same time periods. Such discrepancies can be attributed to rounding and differences in the way NYC ACC reports data from year to year. Regardless, the data trends tell the story: cat and dog adoptions decreased during 2020, the first year of the pandemic, but have since risen to levels that are comparable to or higher than overall rates from the last decade.
The aforementioned story, though, isn’t about how New Yorkers affect ACC adoption rates. ACC exists to find homes for companion animals. To the extent that adoption rates are down, it is ACC’s responsibility to raise them. If ACC officials spent as much effort housing animals as they spend making excuses for not housing animals, ACC would house more animals.
The chart above breaks down what ACC calls “live outcomes” — what becomes of the cats and dogs fortunate enough to leave the system while still drawing breath. As the chart shows, ACC relies heavily on under-funded, private rescues to take up the agency’s slack.
The most successful shelters and animal control facilities direct about 20 percent of intakes toward rescues, and place around 60 percent with adopters, Nathan Winograd of the California-based No Kill Advocacy Center told The Scoop New York. ACC, however, sends more cats and dogs to rescues than it places with adoptive households — another of the countless indices of longstanding management incompetence.
ACC exists to find homes for companion animals. To the extent that adoption rates are down, it is ACC’s responsibility to raise them.
In short, NYC ACC is failing New Yorkers, as it has for three of the last three decades. It is not, and has never been, the other way around.
TSNY will have additional ACC data coverage, including a more detailed look at outgoing rescue transfers, in the not too distant future.
The Scoop New York queried NYC ACC regarding agency claims of plummeting adoption rates. TSNY also asked what ACC is doing to get more companion animals into New Yorkers’ homes.
ACC did not respond.