Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed didn’t run ‘dog slaughterhouse’ in Detroit, despite claims

In August 2026, after Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic Party primary election, a rumor spread online questioning his record as the head of Detroit’s health department, which took over supervision of Detroit Animal Control a few months after El-Sayed took office. According to social media posts, he ran a “dog slaughterhouse” there and oversaw the euthanasia of 74% of the city’s shelter dogs. 

For instance, a widely posted meme (archived) stated: 

Abdulrahman El-Sayed got EXPOSED for the dog slaughterhouse he ran as Detroit’s Director Health where they killed 74% of all dogs in their ‘care’. MAGA Mike Rogers odds of winning are SURGING!

(Snopes reader)

Snopes readers emailed us asking if this was true. 

Public evidence shows that while these allegations were loosely based on actual complaints about conditions at the shelter, El-Sayed wasn’t yet in charge of Detroit Animal Control when the complaints first surfaced. Rather, he inherited the shelter’s problems when animal control was moved from the police department’s control to the health department’s in late 2015. 

As such, we rate this claim as false.

We’ll start by breaking down the timeline of events. El-Sayed was an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia University from 2014 to 2015. In August 2015, he was appointed executive director of the Detroit Health Department. In the fall of 2015, El-Sayed’s health department took over supervision of animal control from the police department.

The accusations about the center and its poor treatment of dogs went public well before El-Sayed was appointed to run the health department, much less oversee animal control. For example, thousands of people signed a petition launched on June 18, 2015, to shut down animal control, claiming it euthanized 95% of the animals it collected.

Brittany Roberts, a former animal control employee filed (archived) a whistleblower lawsuit in October 2015, against Detroit Animal Control, the City of Detroit, the Detroit Police Department, her former supervisor and a veterinarian. Court records show that Roberts did not name the health department or El-Sayed in her lawsuit. Roberts alleged that she was fired for telling the truth about poor conditions in the department’s animal shelter, calling it a “dog slaughterhouse.” In July 2016, the city reached a settlement with Roberts.

Roberts worked at the department from March 2015 and was fired in September 2015, shortly after El-Sayed became head of the health department, which was still transitioning to officially take over animal control. Two days after she filed the lawsuit, then-Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan announced the health department would take over animal control. 

Detroit’s police department was in charge of Detroit Animal Control from 2012 to fall 2015 according to news reports at the time. In October 2015, El-Sayed announced that the city’s health department would take over: 

This move to the health department is an opportunity for us to focus on two important and interrelated aspects of animal welfare in the city: decreasing the harmful public health consequences of stray animals – including dog bites, zoonotic diseases like rabies, and traffic accidents caused by stray animals – while also facilitating the transfer of dogs from our shelter to eventually get into caring homes.

In December 2015, El-Sayed replaced the former animal control director Harry Ward with Melissa Miller. Miller began her tenure as director on Dec. 21, 2015. El-Sayed prevented local news outlet 7 Action News from interviewing her, citing the outlet’s past negative coverage of Detroit’s animal control department. 

In a 2024 podcast interview, El-Sayed described part of his role at the health department was managing animal control, which he said “was a mess at the time”: 

When I was the new director of the Detroit Health Department, I inherited a part of the job that I never trained for and never thought I would do, which is Detroit Animal Control. And it was a mess at the time, and I needed somebody who I could trust, who could come in and do right by the animals and right by the people of the city of Detroit. And Mel Miller was that person. 

The Detroit News reported that the city animal shelters had a 74% euthanasia rate in 2015. El-Sayed took over in the fall of that year. After the health department began its oversight, animal control’s budget doubled from around $1.2 million to $2.3 million, according to Detroit News. The department also increased hiring, volunteer programming and dog bite prevention efforts. 

Further, a 2018 Detroit News report said the city’s animal shelters’ euthanasia rate fell from 74% in 2015 to about 35% in 2017, according to annual shelter reports submitted to the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development. In 2016, the Michigan Humane Society gave its former building to Detroit Animal Control. 

El-Sayed resigned from the health department in 2017 to run for governor.  

For further reading, Snopes has previously reported on the false claim that El-Sayed said he believed the U.S. deserved the 9/11 terrorist attacks. 

Sources