NYC ACC May Play the Media, but New Yorkers Have Eyes [Addended]
Homeless animals would be better served if news outlets were less credulous concerning the city’s animal control contractor, and more critical.
Note: A new penultimate paragraph was added to this story the day after publication. — Ed.
Over the past year, at least three prominent New York City news outlets have published stories about the city’s homeless companion animal crisis.
Two of the stories, from Gothamist and Curbed, were published this week. The other ran in the New York Times last August.
The Gothamist and Times stories hit the familiar beats. The city’s animal control system, an independent non-profit currently known as Animal Care Centers of New York City, is overrun with cats and dogs. Animals are stacked in cages in ACC hallways, with little time to play or even move freely. It’s so dire that the system has endured perpetual shutdowns, cutting off intakes though it is by law required to accept all surrendered animals (without apparent consequence for repeatedly breaking its contract with the city).
In this telling, NYC ACC is the victim of public and political indifference. However, while city and state politicians doubtlessly can and should be doing much more to aid companion animals and the New Yorkers who care for them, that does not absolve ACC of its responsibilities — particularly when so many of its problems are self-inflicted, sometimes willfully.
In the Gothamist story, for instance, ACC blames conditions at its facilities on New Yorkers, who it says aren’t adopting enough animals after dumping too many post-COVID:
Animal Care Centers of NYC said it’s still dealing with overcrowding that has plagued shelters since the number of returned pets surged after a pandemic-era adoption boom. But Katy Hansen, a spokesperson for the city animal shelters, explained in an interview that the problem isn’t that an unusual number of New Yorkers are surrendering their pets. Instead, it’s that adoptions are way down.
To begin with, the purported post-pandemic surrender fest is a myth. “Cat and dog surrender rates have not increased,” wrote Nathan Winograd of the California-based No Kill Advocacy Center, last winter. “In fact, dog surrender rates are decreasing, and both are still well below pre-pandemic levels.”
ACC’s own intake numbers bear that out. As The Scoop New York reported last spring, the number of cats and dogs entering ACC dropped 52 percent from 2014 to 2023. Intakes declined almost 40 percent from 2019 to 2020, when COVID hit, and have remained at comparable levels since.
At the same time, people who want to adopt from ACC consistently face obstacles that seem meant to discourage them. ACC maintains hours that make visits difficult for people who, say, have day jobs. The Staten Island branch is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. five days a week, and is closed completely on Mondays and Tuesdays. The Manhattan and Brooklyn locations are open six hours a day. All ACC facilities were once open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. seven days a week.
Would-be adopters who are able to visit during open hours are liable to run into other ACC-constructed barriers. Recent visitors to ACC’s Brooklyn and Manhattan facilities reported being barred from entry without a completed adoption application, which they were forced to fill out while remaining outside, one of them in the rain. When an adoptable animal is at risk of being put down, ACC may or may not inform the outside world ahead of time. And New Yorkers have for years spoken of how hard it can be to even get an ACC employee on the phone.
These are arbitrary ACC policies and procedures that have nothing to do with public apathy. And they persist despite the fact that in 2019 ACC inked a 34-year, $1.4 billion deal with the city. Which means one of two things: ACC is either so inept that it short-changed itself for the next three decades accidentally, or so indifferent to companion animals and the public that it did so with intent.
Regardless, access media tend to uncritically transcribe whatever excuses ACC has on offer. If it isn’t more intakes, it’s fewer adoptions. It’s the pandemic. It’s the economy. It’s the vet shortage. As if ACC has, at any point in its 30-year history, competently carried out the job New Yorkers pay it to do.
“Aside from an epic failure of journalism to accurately report on this topic,” Winograd writes, “these articles are also unfortunate because they allow shelters to continue avoiding accountability for their own shoddy practices by pointing the finger of blame outward.”
There are other quibbles. The unchallenged (and demonstrably false) claim that ACC only kills animals who are sick. (Which: Why aren’t sick animals — who are often perfectly healthy when they enter ACC — treated, rather than being put to death? It’s a “shelter,” after all, n'est-ce pas?) Repeating without question ACC’s official (and fabricated) live release rate. The word “euthanize,” which doesn’t mean what ACC and the media think it means.
The Curbed piece could be considered a corrective. Rather than pegging her story on ACC spin, reporter Molly Osberg centers everyday New Yorkers who, compelled by their humanity (by all indications a verboten quality at ACC), take up the city’s slack by managing neighborhood cat colonies. In the richest city in the world, it’s left to individual citizens to minister to homeless animals and, therefore, safeguard public health, on their own time and often with their own money. Because NYC ACC won’t do its job, and the mayor and City Council prefer it that way.
“The only thing that has improved at the city kill pound,” says prominent NYC no kill advocate Andrew Weprin, “is the effectiveness of their propaganda campaign that excuses killing by falsely portraying shelter bureaucrats as the hapless victims of a public that suddenly doesn’t love dogs and cats anymore.”