An NYPD cop-turned-animal-welfare agent is stepping forward to charge that the ASPCA is cutting ethical and legal corners in its attempt to abolish the city’s horse-carriage industry.
“It’s like targeting. It’s like racial profiling,” Henry Ruiz said of the agency’s efforts to uncover wrongdoing in the century-old industry.
Ruiz said the ASPCA commissioned an independent study about four years ago that determined the horses were well cared for. He said the study was never released because it clashed with the ASPCA’s agenda. The agency claimed no such study exists.
In his nine years with the ASPCA, Ruiz said he never witnessed cruelty involving a carriage horse.
But he said that didn’t stop the agency from routinely dispatching agents to patrol the horse line outside Central Park, especially around the Christmas holidays.
“You were supposed to give out at least 10 [summonses] that night,” he recalled. “You’re basically targeting people to find something wrong that probably isn’t there.”
In nearly 18 years at the NYPD, Ruiz worked undercover narcotics. He joined the ASPCA to root out abuses against animals in perilous settings such as puppy mills.
Ruiz said he became disillusioned about the ASPCA’s direction about a year ago, and left.
He said he is speaking out now to defend ASPCA vet Dr. Pamela Corey, who was suspended last month after trying to correct a press release declaring that a horse that died on a Midtown street “was forced to work in spite of painful maladies” and “was likely suffering from pain.”
That fit with the ASPCA agenda. It just didn’t fit with the facts.
Preliminary findings by Cornell University’s Animal Health Diagnostic Center reported that the horse named Charlie showed “no signs of illness” the morning it died, and while there was evidence of gastritis and pancreatic problems, “the significance of this is not clear.”
“Her integrity is beyond reproach,” said Ruiz. “She won’t make up something that isn’t there.”
Corey told DVM magazine, which covers veterinarians, that even though there wasn’t enough information to pass judgment, the ASPCA pushed her for a statement, and she — mistakenly — signed off on it.
When she tried to correct it, she got the boot.
“It’s not a tenable working relationship,” Corey told DVM, speaking of the ASPCA’s dual role of trying to abolish the horse carriage industry and overseeing it.
“You want to do one thing or the other. You want to have objective facts or lobby government to change rules for animals . . . They don’t understand what they’ve really made me do.”
ASPCA spokesman Bret Hopman refused to discuss Corey’s status. But he insisted the agency can be an advocate and enforcer at the same time.
“Our goal is the well-being of the horses, not simply the absence of cruelty,” he said.