"Captain is part of the governor's family and for your nameless ill-informed source to imply they've been trying to give him away is untrue."

"Someone offered to watch him for a few days while the transition was ongoing but for that to be weaponized and morph from a game of telephone into the pages of your paper is absurd — now excuse us we're preparing for a major storm."

Said a spokesman for Andrew Cuomo, quoted in "Cuomo's dog Captain left at mansion after governor departed" (Times Union). 

The dog is "a high-strung mix of shepherd, Siberian and malamute" who "has nipped a few people since Cuomo adopted him in 2018." 

These politicians and their fake dogs.

ADDED: Wikipedia has a nice list of all the Presidents "pets." I put pets in quotes because they're all animals but not all pets. Included on the list are horses used in battle and silkworms, whose silk was spun by Louisa Adams, the wife of John Quincy Adams. 

Quincy Adams also had an alligator — "Said to have belonged to Marquis de Lafayette and housed for two months in the East Room." Emphasis on "said." Andrew Jackson kept fighting cocks. Thomas Jefferson had 2 grizzly bear cubs — a gift from Captain Zebulon Pike:

In a letter to his granddaughter, Ann Cary Randolph, he mentioned the arrival of the grizzly cubs from Pike and stated flatly, "these are too dangerous & troublesome for me to keep. I shall therefore send them to Peale’s Museum." Charles Willson Peale, artist and devotee of the natural sciences, was a friend and correspondent of Jefferson's. In 1786 he had opened a museum in Philadelphia that displayed portraits he had painted of American notables (including Jefferson) along with a varied and growing collection of natural history objects. Peale had one brief experience with a live grizzly, which had been brought to Philadelphia by a French trader. In March 1804 Peale advertised that the "Famous Grisly Bear" would be on display at the museum for two weeks. But the grizzly, estimated to be two years old, proved too dangerous: It broke its chain and cage, and was put down. 

In writing to ask Peale if he would take the two bears, Jefferson stressed that they had been taken as cubs, were "perfectly gentle" and "appear quite good humored." Jefferson added that they didn't eat much, primarily "Indian bread," and could be of interest to visitors to the museum. Peale wrote back: "this charge I will chearfully undertake." Jefferson must have greeted Peale's response with enthusiasm, but it took almost two months to get the cubs, one male and one female, on their way to Philadelphia. 

Meanwhile, the bears outgrew their cage and apparently spent some time in an enclosure on the lawn of the President's House. No doubt some passers-by enjoyed seeing the grizzlies, but this gave Jefferson's political opponents the opportunity to gleefully refer to his "bear-garden," a term going back to Elizabethan-era bear-baiting arenas that still carried a connotation of a rough, noisy area lacking any sort of decorum. 

When the two grizzlies were delivered to Peale on January 28, 1808, he immediately set about securing a large cage for them, and expressed hope that they would eventually breed. He knew from a bearskin given him by Lewis that grizzlies could grow to be quite large. "[W]e hope to see them get their full groath," Peale wrote to Jefferson, "& also to assertain what they may weigh when they acquire their full size." As these bears had been with humans almost from birth, the expectation seemed to be that they would adapt well to captivity. But this was not to be the case. As they matured, they became more threatening. It is not clear how long Peale had the bears before one of them broke out of its cage and, after terrorizing the Peale family, was shot in the basement kitchen. The other bear was put down as well, then both were mounted and placed on display in Peale's museum.