An animal program beyond its impact statement

Does the city’s spay and neuter program work?

The city Comptroller’s review found that DOHMH has set no metrics for whether its subsidized spay and neuter program works and publishes no surgery counts, so the program’s claimed impact cannot be checked from public records. New York City runs an animal population control program under the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), built around subsidized spaying and neutering for eligible pet owners. The premise: fund sterilization surgeries, reduce the number of unaltered dogs and cats, and over time bring down shelter intake and the stray population on city streets.

That premise is the claimed outcome. It’s the legislative goal behind the Program, and it’s the standard against which any review of the Program has to be measured.

The trouble starts with what DOHMH can actually show for it. According to the New York City Comptroller’s review of the city’s animal population control efforts, the agency does not publicly report data on the Program’s own activities or outcomes. No public figures exist for the total number of sterilization surgeries performed under the Program, broken down by species or sex.

The same gaps cover location, eligibility category and unmet demand, listed in full in the last section.

DOHMH officials, per the same review, have argued that the Program is a small piece of a broader legislative goal and was never going to move the needle on stray animal numbers by itself. The review team’s response is that the Program’s size is not a reason to skip measurement. DOHMH has not established metrics by which the overall impact of the Program can be measured, according to the Comptroller’s findings.

Separately, the review cites national context from the Shelter Animals Count’s Altered Status Data Report, showing that by 2023 only 22.3% of dog intakes and 22.0% of cat intakes nationally were already sterilized at shelter entry, a decline from 2019 levels. The city does not publicly report this metric for its own shelter population, so there’s no local figure to compare against that national trend.

The review does put the Program’s scale on the record, and the contrast is stark. It reports that maintaining animal shelters under a 34-year contract cost the City almost $1.9 billion, translating to almost $54 million a year, while the Program created to address one of the root causes of shelter need received an average of only $316,000 in each of the last three fiscal years reviewed.

The claimed outcome, then, sits at a distance from any published proof. A program can exist, spend money, and perform surgeries, and still leave the public with no way to verify whether it’s shrinking the problem it was built to address.

Follow the source

The Comptroller’s review is the primary document behind every claim in this piece, and its origin matters as much as its findings. The review did not begin as a routine audit DOHMH requested; pressure from outside the agency brought it about.

According to the report, the review was prompted by concerns raised by animal rights and animal welfare advocacy groups, many of which surfaced during testimony at a City Council hearing held on September 13, 2024. Veterinarians, animal rescuers, and non-profit leaders used that hearing to call for more funding aimed at reducing shelter populations, supporting pet owners, and cutting down the number of stray animals on city streets.

That testimony set the review’s scope. The Comptroller’s objectives were twofold: evaluate how effectively DOHMH implements, administers, and enforces the Program, and look at how other jurisdictions handle the same problem.

The comparative research is worth following closely because it’s where the report gets concrete about alternatives. The review team contacted animal control agencies in three other cities, Chicago, San Antonio, and Jacksonville, along with the New Jersey Department of Health, asking how each handles stray animal populations, whether they run a similar subsidized program for qualifying residents, and whether they use trap-neuter-return (TNR) rescuers, and if so, whether those services are publicly funded or paid out of pocket by the rescuers themselves.

Chicago’s answer stands out: the city reported no animal population control program aimed at reducing stray cat and dog numbers.

The report also tracks a pending legislative response. New York State Bill 2025-A3122, introduced in Albany, would redirect city-generated animal welfare fees into the Program’s fund and require that up to 15% of that funding support population education, if the bill passes.

DOHMH’s formal response to the draft report pushed back on part of the analysis. The agency argued that the review understates the gap between New York City’s dog license fees and those charged elsewhere, and that the city’s comparatively low base license fee explains why the Program’s fee structure can’t fully fund it.

The Comptroller’s review team notes that DOHMH did not identify the sources behind its comparative fee data, so the review offers no opinion on whether that argument holds up. It does not leave it there, though. The team adds that DOHMH’s argument nonetheless reinforces the review’s own finding that the agency should identify and use additional funding streams to supplement the Program. Conceding the fee structure is inadequate is not a defense against being told to find more money.

Read the oversight question

The oversight question at the center of the Comptroller’s review is simple to state and harder to answer: does the Program work, and how would anyone know? DOHMH has not built a way to measure that, according to the review’s core finding.

Officials at the agency have offered a defense. The law creating the Program, they argue, reflects a broad legislative goal, and the Program itself is a small contributor to that goal, one piece within a larger mechanism for solving the stray animal problem.

DOHMH also told review staff that the Program was never going to have a measurable impact on stray populations by itself.

The Comptroller’s review does not dismiss that defense outright, but it does not accept it as a stopping point either. The report states plainly that the size of the Program is not a good reason to skip measuring its effectiveness.

A program can be modest in scale and still be evaluated for what it delivers relative to what it costs and what it was built to do.

To get an independent read specifically on public awareness, apart from agency performance, the review team ran its own survey. Staff distributed questionnaires over five days to 431 people entering or leaving Petco and PetSmart locations across the five boroughs, and received 106 responses, a 25% response rate.

The survey asked 18 questions covering pet ownership, awareness of the Program and dog licensing rules, experience with stray animals in the respondent’s neighborhood, and opinions on the city’s animal population control efforts generally.

Among the 106 respondents, 78 (74%) said they owned a pet: 37 (47%) owned at least one dog, 34 (44%) owned at least one cat, and 7 (9%) reported another type of pet. The review frames the broader survey finding as showing that most respondents were not aware of the Program or of dog licensing requirements, a gap that matters regardless of how well the Program performs on paper, since a subsidy nobody knows about cannot reach the people it is meant to serve.

Hold those percentages loosely. This was 106 responses from people approached outside Petco and PetSmart locations over five days, a convenience sample of shoppers at those two retailers that doesn’t represent the city’s pet owners as a whole, and people entering a pet retailer are not a random slice of anything. It tells you what 106 people said. It does not measure citywide awareness, and the review presents it as its own standalone survey, separate from any population estimate.

That combination, no outcome metrics from the agency and low awareness among the people surveyed, is the shape of the oversight gap the report documents.

Ask for the next record

The next records worth requesting are the ones the Comptroller’s review says do not yet exist in public form. DOHMH does not publish surgery counts, geographic breakdowns, eligibility-category data, or figures on unmet demand for the Program, and each of those gaps points to a specific document or dataset a records request could target.

A useful starting list, drawn directly from what the review identifies as missing:

• The total number of spaying and neutering surgeries performed under the Program, broken down by species and sex.
• The zip codes where eligible owners resided when their pets received sterilization surgeries.
• The number of pet owners served, categorized by eligibility criteria such as Medicaid, food stamps, or public housing assistance.
• The number of requested sterilizations the Program could not perform because of funding or capacity limits.

One number in the review is already answered, and it is the one worth carrying. Against a contract target of 12,000 surgeries, the report puts the figure at 7,607 over the three-year period and calls it far short. Read what that counts before quoting it: the table it comes from is surgeries achievable with the dog licensing surcharge revenue actually collected, priced at $125 per surgery, across fiscal 2022, 2023 and 2024. It is a funding capacity figure. The review does not supply a verified count of operations performed for that comparison. A later disclosure would need its own dated record.

The report also records that the contract covers reimbursement for a maximum of 24,000 sterilization surgeries, so three different numbers are in play at once: the contract ceiling, the target, and what the revenue would pay for.

Local sterilization prevalence is another open item. The Shelter Animals Count national data cited in the review shows a declining share of sterilized animals at shelter intake nationally, but the city does not publish its own version of that metric.

A records request or public comment could ask DOHMH to report local intake sterilization rates on the same basis, so residents have a city-specific number instead of a national proxy.

DOHMH’s dispute with the review over license fee comparisons is also unresolved. The agency claimed the city’s fee structure lags behind other municipalities, but did not disclose its data sources, and the review team took no position on whether that claim holds up.

Requesting DOHMH’s underlying fee comparison data would close that gap.

Progress on New York State Bill 2025-A3122 is worth watching too. If passed, it would redirect city-generated animal welfare fees toward the Program and require a share of new funding, up to 15%, to go toward population education.

Whether the bill advances, and whether new funding is followed by new public reporting, are separate questions, and the Comptroller’s review gives no indication either has been settled.