They’re marked for death — just to cut costs and save cage space.

Homeless dogs with the slightest coughs are routinely fast-tracked for execution at the cash-strapped Animal Care and Control shelter in East Harlem, multiple inside sources tell The Post.

“There’s no doubt that animals are being labeled as being sick or dangerous so they can be killed more quickly,” said Emily Tanen, a former paid staffer at ACC’s shelter at 326 E. 110th St.

“Dogs come in healthy, and within a few days, they’re dead.

“As soon as they start coughing, we’re allowed to kill them and say it’s ‘disease euth.’ ”

The unwritten policy is designed as both a space-saving measure and an end-run around charity-funding rules, charge Tanen and two current Manhattan ACC workers who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The otherwise healthy dogs simply suffer from curable kennel coughs, a common animal-shelter malady, the sources say. The illness — contagious to other dogs and marked by a runny nose, coughing, sneezing and lethargy — can be cured if a dog is isolated and placed on a 10-day regimen of antibiotics.

But each night, anywhere from a few to more than a dozen dogs are quickly shunted onto the shelter’s “euth list” for euthanasia the next morning — with kennel cough as the most common death-penalty offense, say Tanen and the two workers.

Charities that provide vital funding to the shelter — on condition that dogs won’t be killed solely for space reasons — are told the dogs were killed due to “disease,” these insiders say.

Tanen, a respected anti-euthanasia activist, was fired May 13 and is director of Project Pet, a private animal organization she founded three years ago.

She says that she was only told, “It’s not working out,” when she was fired, but that it followed a dispute over her sending out adoption photos of dogs posing with people, which was against policy. The ACC refused to say why she was fired.

Julie Bank, executive director of ACC, which also runs shelters in Brooklyn and Staten Island, dismissed criticisms about the shelter’s euthanasia practices as baseless, noting the organization rescues about 40,000 animals annually.

“Last year, over 17,000 animals got out of our building alive,” she said. “So the thought that we are not proactively trying to get the animals adopted is not accurate.”

The agency’s Web site also notes that the number of euthanized dogs has fallen dramatically in the past five years, dipping from 4,824 killed in 2006 to 2,226 last year.

But Tanen and the other staffers argue that the statistics can’t disguise that dogs are still routinely being killed more quickly than can be humanely justified.

philip.messing@nypost.com

