FATAL ERROR: Activists say the city’s Animal Care and Control database is responsible for the deaths of Noble (top), Max (left) and Rhoda (right). Although they were adopted online, a glitch resulted in the cats being euthanized. (
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A computer glitch is killing cats.
Animal Care and Control exterminated at least a dozen felines as families were coming in to rescue them because a new online adoption system is rife with errors, a former employee and activists say.
The city’s shelter system rolled out a death-row database last month, alerting the public for the first time to pets about to die.
Each night at about 5 p.m., the agency posts a list of animals scheduled to be euthanized the next day, and rescuers have until 6 a.m. to adopt them.
A member of one rescue group said she went online to reserve Max, a 2-year-old black and white cat who had a home waiting for him in Connecticut.
She said the Web site told her she’d soon receive an e-mail confirmation. She never got one, so she e-mailed the shelter.
“When you call them, they don’t pick up, and they don’t e-mail you back,” said the heartbroken volunteer. “You’re sitting in the darkness, never knowing what’s going on there.”
The next day, a shelter rep said her request was never received — and that poor Max was gone.
Elizabeth McMahon, 48, of Brooklyn, lost Tooperina, a 12-year-old tabby, the same way.
Again, her group received a confirmation on the screen, but not via e-mail.
“It’s not a system, it’s a state of chaos with no one taking responsibility,” McMahon said, adding that her group requested four other cats that night, but no one knows whether they were killed or adopted by someone else.
“They’re using the animals as guinea pigs,” said P.J. McKosky, head of the Empty Cages Collective in Brooklyn.
“They’re working out the kinks without a safety net, and that’s resulted in deaths.”
Julie Bank, director of ACC — a nonprofit city contractor that gets $8 million in taxpayer money — chalked up the deadly mix-ups to “user error.”
“There’s been three regular [rescue groups] who seem to constantly have problems with the site,” Bank said, adding that they don’t want to “move into the future in technology.”
“Every time we are noticing problems, it is user error. They forgot to press the submit button. They walked away, and the computer timed out.”
The database, funded by undisclosed private funds, took a year to develop, Bank said.
But a former ACC employee said there were glitches in the new system, and that her supervisors told her to keep quiet about them.
Some animals never showed up on the list and were therefore killed without a fighting chance; the Web site’s pages would freeze; and pets that were already euthanized would be re-listed on the database.
The whistleblower, who said she resigned because she couldn’t stand the agency’s negligence anymore, said that at least a dozen animals died because of the computer error.
“There are lives counting on this to work properly,” she said. “I had expected better for New York City’s animals.”