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The Hidden Dogs of the NYC ACC

by Urgent PART 2 on Friday, July 15, 2011 at 3:42pm

Sometimes during a fight for change, the essential message gets muddied with time and anecdotes. We firmly believe that we cannot advance the cause of reform while inaccurate information continues to float around. Some people have “heard” that AC&C does one thing, some have "heard" otherwise. Some people visit during a busy Saturday (or an empty Tuesday evening) and assume that the shelter always runs a certain way, and some people just cannot imagine the place as it truly is and make assumptions based on their own standards of decency.

To that end, we will be offering a “fun fact” about AC&C on a regular basis for you to verify next time you visit.

Today’s “fun fact about AC&C” is….

Only about 20 percent of the dogs at AC&C are viewable for adoption at any given time.

In a shelter designed to isolate animals in multiple rooms (“wards”) over a large space, management takes steps to limit public access to as tiny an area as possible. They don’t want you sneaking around, stealing animals or, more likely, seeing the filth and misery most of the animals live in. This means that when you go to either the Brooklyn or Manhattan shelter to look at a dog as a private citizen, you will be shown only a small portion of the general population. If you ask an employee about the animals in the other wards, they will tell you that those animals are “not available” for adoption.

This is a lie.

The truth is, there are plenty of dogs in both buildings who are off “hold” (a mandatory courtesy period to allow owners to locate their pets, which ranges from 3-days for a stray to 7-days for a seized animal or one with a registered microchip) and who were SAFERED or tested to be “no concern”, “mild”, or “moderate”. These dogs are in these wards for one reason, and one reason alone: because there is no room for them in the miniscule space carved out for “adoptions." Brooklyn is the better of the two “full-service” shelters and offers a little over 35 potential slots, but the Manhattan shelter is truly abysmal, offering only 18 cages out of over 100 to showcase adoptable dogs. In fact, there is a dog featured right now on the “adoptable pets flyer” who you will not be able to find in the Manhattan shelter if you are Joe Public. This is because she has been in the hidden wards waiting for a space to open up in adoptions for days now:

Desta, adorable and already spayed 2 year old, hopes that she can be seen by a family before she gets killed for catching a cold licking the unsanitary water bowls and food trays.

The AC&C says that they have not killed for space this year. Aside from the obvious ways we can poke holes in that claim, let’s consider another challenge to the Big Lie:

What do you call it when you keep an adoptable animal out of public view until they get sick and you can kill them?

This is killing for space. Plain and simple. A dog who will have never even had a chance to be adopted because she was never allowed to be seen by the public. And she is not alone. In fact, taking plain numbers into account, she would be the norm. And that is sad.

Extra fun fact: only the dogs in adoptions get walked by volunteers, except for about 11 veteran volunteers (the ones Elisabeth hasn’t kicked out yet) spread out over both buildings all week, there is no one else to walk the dogs. All the remaining dogs ROT, putting employees at-risk and creating a cacophony of misery, need, and loneliness.

There will soon be a “level two” program to grant volunteers access to some of these dogs, but it only appears over 10 months after its original inclusion in the “volunteer opportunity” handbook. Elisabeth Manwiller certainly knows how to break a sweat and hustle for the animals when the chips are down, doesn't she?

We hope you are proud of your adopted “daughter”, Julie!

#adoptable dog #adoptable dogs #dog #dogs #hidden dogs #manhattan #new york city #nyc #nyc acc