The Anatomy of a Lie

How the pound, the Mayor’s Alliance, the ASPCA, and Maddie’s Fund conspire to hide the truth about New York City’s abusive pound system, allowing immense animal suffering to continue.

In late March, a pregnant lab-mix given the name of Ginger entered the New York City pound system. She was full term, within a day or so of giving birth. Spaying a dog in the peak of health is considered major abdominal surgery. Spaying a pregnant dog increases the risk as the blood vessels of her reproductive tract become large and more difficult to tie off during pregnancy. Spaying a pregnant dog at full-term is the riskiest of all: the risk of excessive bleeding is greatest and complications more likely. And, of course, spaying a pregnant dog means killing the puppies. Nonetheless, Ginger was spayed, and her fully viable litter of puppies was killed.

In order to kill them, each and every one of the healthy puppies had to be individually injected with poison. The killing of the puppies was, in point and fact, no different than if they had already been born since they had been born: by the equivalent of a C-section. They were able to survive on their own and, in fact, had survived. But not for long.

One by one, they were injected in the stomach with an overdose of barbiturates. One by one, each went limp and then died. One by one, their lifeless bodies were discarded in the trash, revealing the great hypocrisy of the broken pound system in the U.S., a system which chastises people for treating their companion animals as “disposable” even while they treat them exactly the same way: by killing them and then literally disposing of their bodies in landfills. The new lives of Ginger’s puppies, which should have held nothing but promise, instead were wiped out by callous indifference. It was a tragedy, but it should have surprised no one.

Enter Julie Bank

The New York City pound is run by Julie Bank whose tenure there has been marked by the firing of anyone who disclose inhumane conditions, the violation of the first Amendment and civil rights of volunteers, the scaling back and elimination of programs designed to save animals, and the creation of a culture that tolerates chronic neglect and abuse. That, too, should have surprised no one. Because, in fact, this was also how she ran the “shelter” at her previous job.

Bank was part of the executive team under Ed Boks which ran Maricopa County, AZ animal control into the ground. (Boks was also Bank’s predecessor at New York City’s pound before he was fired.) Bank’s job was to “sell” Boks’ failures as success, by lying to supporters, to elected officials, and to the media that the agency was a model of compassionate care, even as she and Boks knew full well that the agency was in trouble. Under her tenure, the Maricopa pound slaughtered tens of thousands of animals a year, opened up a $600,000 a year structural deficit, and forced the agency into receivership. Volunteers were forced to walk dogs with ropes because the agency was not allowed to buy leashes, even while Bank was telling anyone who would listen that they were the most progressive adoption agency in the nation and on the verge of achieving No Kill (they never did better than a 50% save rate, less than the national average). She abandoned ship while the agency was sinking under the twin pillars of Boks-Bank ineptitude and neglect.  Given her history and the conditions in the pound she currently oversees, why would she ever give so much as a second’s thought to Ginger’s puppies? In fact, she wouldn’t and didn’t and that is why she ordered them killed.

Enter Jane Hoffman

After the surgery, Ginger began to bleed internally, a fact that AC&C noticed almost too late. Ginger underwent a second surgery at a private veterinary clinic to save her. That surgery was paid for through donations made to the Mayor’s Alliance for NYC Animals. In turn, Jane Hoffman who runs (owns?) the Mayor’s Alliance put out a fundraising appeal based on Ginger’s case.

In the piece, Hoffman writes of Ginger in Ginger’s “voice”:

AC&C staff named me Ginger, and took me in to get me ready to meet new adopters. But as luck would have it, my adoption debut had to be postponed when a vet at AC&C discovered I was bleeding internally.

To read the appeal, you would think Ginger came into the pound needing critical surgery. In reality, AC&C caused Ginger’s internal bleeding through a wholly unnecessary and risky surgery in order to kill her puppies, almost killing her in the process. But Hoffman has to obfuscate to separate money from donors as the truth, in this case, would not likely have brought in the big bucks. Had she been honest, she would have written it this way:

AC&C decided to perform an unnecessary surgery in order to kill my puppies. I never got to love them, never got to nurse them, never had a chance to lick their tiny bodies, to take in their warm breath which smells of bubble gum. I never even got to see them because someone cut me open, took them out, and then poisoned each and every one of them before throwing their bodies in the trash.They didn’t even give them names. In fact, no record of them exists. Following the surgery, I began to bleed internally. Thankfully, AC&C did not do the surgery. They sent me out to a private veterinarian who saved me. Of course, that cost money, which you are now being asked to pay even though I wouldn’t have needed the surgery if AC&C didn’t botch the first one in order to kill my puppies.