The Kill Quota: Why ACC, NYC DOH Will Never Stop Slaughtering Cats and Dogs
NYC ACC kill percentages have varied little post-COVID. There's a reason for that.
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.
Headlines from Buffalo to Brooklyn
It’s June 27, 2025. This is The Weekly Poop.
This week, the non-profit contractor currently known as Animal Care Centers of New York City, in concert with its overseers at the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, ceased communicating with volunteers about more than a dozen dogs the advocates were trying to save.
By the time advocates finally heard from them, ACC and DOH had exterminated nearly all the disappeared dogs.
The Scoop New York was notified of the missing dogs on social media last Sunday by advocate Christine Kinser.
Kinser wasn’t the only volunteer trying frantically to find foster homes and rescues for the dogs before ACC/DOH could kill them.
This is how ACC — presently supervised by acting health commissioner Dr. Michelle Morse — treats New Yorkers and others who devote their time and energy toward helping the “care center” system achieve its stated mission.
Though the contempt they have for New Yorkers is clear, it’s merely a symptom. A by-product of the kill pound system’s modus operandi at least since the pandemic. That being the ACC/DOH kill quota.
Post-COVID, available data — including all cat and dog intakes, minus ~1 percent euthanized for irremediable suffering — show ACC/DOH has, percentage-wise, consistently killed about the same number of cats and dogs month after month, regardless of intake numbers.
In each month of 2024, for instance, ACC/DOH killed between one and two cats out of every 10 admitted, even as intakes rose and fell.
ACC/DOH exterminated between 2.5 and 3.5 dogs out of 10 nearly every month last year, again irrespective of intakes.
There are exceptions, such as those months when ACC/DOH feels it has a surfeit of dogs to kill. This periodically causes the dog live release rate to drop below the ~70 percent average — last July, for example, when ACC/DOH put more than four dogs to death of every 10 who entered the system.
Four out of 10.
Otis, Kirkle, Ghost, Seagull, Rollie, Bewildered, Noodle, Paprika and Benji — each taken into the back room, where the public can’t see and dipshit access “journalists” don’t care to, and given the needle, as advocates begged ACC/DOH for their whereabouts and condition.
When TSNY first asked about the missing dogs, ACC spokesperson Katy Hansen apologized for not updating the kill list quickly enough. To be fair, I’m not sure I could type that fast either. But it was obviously beside the point, and standard operating procedure for Hansen et al., whose IRL mission is to hold onto their publicly-funded jobs while avoiding public accountability, by hiding whenever possible or, when they deign to respond to the New Yorkers whose labor pays their salaries, obfuscating and trolling.
The data strongly suggest ACC and DOH have settled on a percentage of cats and dogs for “live outcomes,” with the rest to be exterminated, and the exterminations supported during and after the fact (as far as ACC and DOH are concerned, anyway) by medical notes that attempt to excuse them.
The stated reasons for most kill list additions are either “behavior” (to be expected in a foreign, hostile environment), or easily treatable illnesses. Anyone paying attention (which, again, does not include complicit media) would question the disconnect between those reports and ACC/DOH’s repeated and obviously meritless claim that the “shelter” system only kills for uncontrollable aggression and unremitting pain. They can’t keep their lies straight. And they don’t have to, because the elected officials charged with monitoring DOH and ACC are in on the game.
Department heads and City Council members, mayors and comptrollers — all politicians and bureaucrats, all feeding from the same trough. When it comes to New York City governance. there are fewer checks and balances than back slaps and high-fives.
So DOH and ACC remain free to keep reduced hours that make it harder for New Yorkers to adopt. They are free to shut ACC’s doors to intakes whenever they wish, in violation of the agency’s $1.4B contract with the public. They are free to continue mistreating New Yorkers who only want the city’s homeless and abandoned cats and dogs to be safe and happy.
“At the beginning of every year, no-kill advocates and shelter watchdogs can tell you what the numbers will be by the end of the year,” longtime NYC no-kill advocate Andrew Weprin told TSNY in a written statement. “In any given year — regardless of intake — we can expect NYC ACC to exterminate about 3,000 perfectly adoptable cats and dogs. And in recent years, whenever we do the math we will see that roughly one out of every three dogs and one out every five cats who go through the front door of the city pound will come out the back door in a garbage bag.
“Make no mistake,” Weprin concludes, “there is a kill quota!”
The Scoop New York asked ACC and DOH to confirm the existence of a kill quota. If there isn’t one, we asked ACC/DOH to explain the consistent kill rates, regardless of intakes. We asked why ACC/DOH kills sick animals, rather than treating them. We asked why ACC/DOH kills animals who react normally to hellish ACC conditions. We asked why ACC/DOH doesn’t admit to the public that it kills dogs for illness and behavior that is virtually always triggered by those conditions. We asked why ACC/DOH willfully torments and abuses volunteers and advocates.
There was no reply.
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Here’s the latest New York companion animal news:
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State Senator Sean Ryan won the Democratic primary for Buffalo mayor in a race local political knowers say won’t be over until November.
Come 2026 Council Member Justin Brannan will no longer be a New York City elected official.
Vomitous: NYC ACC killed Juliette, one of the dogs who attacked Penny on the UWS, then made a big weepy show of pretending to give a shit.
The Bed-Stuy “aquarium” is back to cruelly kill more fish (and resume the grift?) as the “Mayors Office of Animal Welfare” — in actuality a City Hall flack’s desk walled off from public contact — is, as usual, nowhere.
Meet Chili, the badass chihuahua who kept himself alive until he could be pulled from the Hudson River.
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Tick season in New York ain’t what it used to be.
And finally: Whatever you say, Daily News editorial board!
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