NYC DOH to New Yorkers: Get Fucked
A review of its legally-mandated animal population control program reveals DOH as indifferent, intransigent and defiant.
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 May 18, 2026. This is The Weekly Poop.
Last week, New York City Comptroller Mark Levine — the city’s fiscal ombudsman — released a report on the city health department’s animal population control program, a legally-required effort to reduce the number of stray cats and dogs by “encouraging” New Yorkers to spay and neuter their pets and “providing no- or low-cost spaying and neutering services.”
As anyone who does DOH’s job could have told him, Levine found the agency’s spay-neuter effort to be of the low- variety — and what are you plebes gonna do about it?
Unfortunately, to the extent it relies on “shelter” intake and outcome data from DOH and Animal Care Centers of New York City [sic], Levine’s report is useless. See if you can guess why that is:
Surprised? Thought not.
Considering his longstanding role in maintaining The Big Lie — the ludicrous claim that DOH/ACC never kills healthy animals when New Yorkers and no-kill advocates in NYC and beyond have for 31 years lived with the fact that killing healthy animals is what ACC is never not doing — it makes sense that Levine would continue to play along, given the ethically-bankrupt mores of New York’s politician class.
As shown in the footnote above, Levine even attempts to validate silent kills — the thousands upon thousands of adoptable cats and dogs ACC chooses to exterminate without trying to rehome — by pretending, along with ACC and DOH, that “owner-intended euthanasia” or “end-of-life services” are a “community service,” rather than absurdly transparent euphemisms for elective quota killings that ACC and DOH simply exclude from the death toll in order to achieve an arbitrary live release rate.
With Levine disregarding close to half of DOH/ACC victims, any resultant data analyses are worse than nothing.
That doesn’t change the upshot of the report: DOH is purposely half-assing its spay-neuter program, is offloading its attendant responsibilities onto New Yorkers, and has no plans to meet its legally-mandated obligations.
DOH contracted with ASPCA to provide low-cost spay-neuter from fiscal years 2023 to 2029. The $3 million dollar initiative is supposed to fund up to 24,000 surgeries, primarily through dog license fees. But since DOH does little outreach to encourage dog licensing, and has declined to exercise its authority to seek additional spay-neuter funding, “37 [percent] fewer surgeries than anticipated were performed” from FY 2023 to 2025, according to the comptroller report.
Further, the report reads, DOH “has not reimbursed or made regular grants to other entities or private veterinarians to support sterilization efforts outside of the contract with the ASPCA, and DOHMH’s outreach efforts to encourage pet owners to have their dogs and cats spayed — one of the core components of the Program and one of the ASPCA’s responsibilities under the contract — have been sparse.”
As one veteran front-line ACC watcher who reviewed Levine’s report told The Scoop New York, “Rescues cannot readily get spay-neuters in NYC, so this supposed contract with ASPCA is worthless.”
Yet DOH is satisfied with the status quo, regardless of the hardships imposed upon countless everyday New Yorkers.
Based on public input collected at a September 2024 City Council hearing, when New Yorkers testified for eight hours on the tribulations of managing the stray cat population of the country’s largest city with precious little help from the city itself, Levine identified a dozen policy proposals.
Of the nine resulting recommendations in the report, DOH rejected six, “generally agreed” with two, and “partially agreed” with one.
“Rescues cannot readily get spay-neuters in NYC, so this supposed contract with ASPCA is worthless.”
DOH rejected Levine’s recommendation to re-evaluate its animal population control activities generally, “stating that the City has a robust animal population control and animal welfare program.” Clearly!
DOH rejected as “not needed” a recommendation to “track the causes of intakes based on owner relinquishments” and “develop strategies for reducing” such intakes. “DOHMH provides no evidence to support its assertions,” the report reads, adding, “this was generally true of its responses.”
Recommendation: “Focus on reducing community cat populations by considering a range of new options, including a formal assessment of the viability of introducing City-funded TNR programs with appropriate oversight and control measures.”
DOH response: “DOHMH disagreed with this recommendation as ‘not needed.’”
There are other related recommendations and rejections, but to New Yorkers who spend their waking hours, if not their own hard-earned income, taking care of the hundreds of thousands of homeless cats abandoned by The Greatest City in the World™, DOH’s flat refusal to even consider considering city-funded TNR has to be the deepest cut.
Of course, as alluded to earlier, DOH’s smug insistence on neglecting its duties is in no small part thanks to Mark Levine himself.
As a City Council member, Levine chaired the health committee. Like current chair Lynn Schulman, during his tenure Levine failed to push for DOH/ACC reforms that were needed just as much then as now.
When it comes to DOH/ACC mistreatment of homeless and abandoned cats and dogs and the New Yorkers who care for and about them, there are no good guys in city government, only enablers. Mark Levine being more prominent than most.
The fact is DOH long ago outsourced its “animal population control” operation to the inherently dangerous streets of New York City, where agency bigs like Alister Martin and Michelle Morse and Corinne Schiff are content to let nature run its course, and to NYC ACC, where Robin Brennen and her team of black-hoods are all too happy to obliterate cats and dogs who survive the streets only to find they may have been better off before arriving at the city “care center,” where they are as likely to be tortured and killed as directed to the loving, stable home they deserve.
As for the New Yorkers who pay their salaries only to have to take up their slack as well, fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.
OFFICIALS RESPONSIBLE FOR NYC ACC OVERSIGHT
Mayor Zohran Mamdani: Contact form
City Council Speaker Julie Menin: 212-788-7210; Email
Council health chair Lynn Schulman: 212-788-6981; Email
Comptroller Mark Levine: 212-669-3916; Contact forms
Public Advocate Jumaane Williams: 212-669-7250; Email
City Council members: Lookup
Borough presidents: BX; BK; MN; SI; QS
NYC DOH Commissioner Alister Martin: 311; Contact form
NYC DOH ACC minder Corinne Schiff: 646-632-6496; Email
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.
State lawmakers introduced a bill to to make it a misdemeanor to leave animals outdoors without protection from the elements. Baby steps!
New Yorkers had to organize a rally to get Mamdani’s City Hall to finally check a Bronx apartment building for pets 16 days after a fire forced residents out. A live cat and a deceased dog were found, which prompts the question: Did the dog die from the fire, or the city’s failure to act?
A longtime volunteer is suing Brooklyn’s Sean Casey Animal Rescue — a NYC ACC New Hope “partner” — for allegedly offloading dogs to out-of-state kill pounds “to make way for profitable puppies,” the Post reports.
A Hamburg lowlife who killed two kittens and attempted to kill a third got off with no jail time and $250 in fees after tough-talking Erie County District Attorney Michael Keane dropped two felony charges in exchange for a guilty plea to one count of misdemeanor cruelty.
Take a look inside the new 8,000 square-foot Little Guild Animal Shelter facility in Cornwall, which opened to the public on May 9.
Lollypop Farm in Rochester is offering free adoptions for people age 60 and over.
Related: Lollypop Farm is seeking tips “after reports of a deceased animal in the area of St. Paul Boulevard near Windsor Beach.”
Western New York congressional rep Nick Langworthy wants the federal government out of the animal testing business.
Et tu, The Dodo? The site known for uplifting animal content is slinging propaganda for the New York City kill pound.
Finally: See tiny (and annoyed!) kitten Norton rescued after he was stuck for days in the sewers of Massapequa.
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.