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b. Lauren Turnbaugh Foo, Co-Founder of Aloha Animal Alliance, presenting <br /> "The Feral Cat Problem in Liliuokalani Gardens, Banyan Drive, and <br /> Community At-Large. <br /> LL: I'm actually going to be presenting for Lauren. I'm Lisa Lane Cardin of Aloha Animals <br /> Alliance, so thank you guys for having us today. I know this is a hot topic. (Slide— <br /> presenting on Zoom). OK. So, like I said, I'm Lisa, Lisa and Lauren —we formed Aloha <br /> Animal Alliance to really help empower people on organizations to help save and <br /> improve the animals' lives. We are mostly focused on companion animals. How do we <br /> best manage companion animals in a way that helps preserve all species, so, we're <br /> gonna walk through one of the biggest problems, I think, in terms of animal welfare <br /> here on the islands. I come from 20- 25 this year history in animal welfare on the <br /> mainland and Lauren, my colleague, has been here on the Island for over 20 years and I <br /> rely on her for a lot of the local specific information, so, we really formed with the idea <br /> we have a MOU right now sitting in the County office to be the friends of organization <br /> for animal control. We want to really focus on reducing shelter intake and improving <br /> animal health, and we've gotten kind of four core areas where we want to support <br /> Hawaii's pets and people, and these were born out of what you'll see on the last slide <br /> which is a bunch of task force meetings that happened across the Island to identify sort <br /> of the biggest problems in animal welfare. We found those to be lack of access to <br /> information, so we have a vision for an information hub that we would like to put out <br /> bettering access to care solutions, currently, and this is a mainland stat—only 30% of <br /> Americans can afford an emergency or routine vet visit and I believe that that number is <br /> probably even higher here in Hawaii. We really see a lack of community engagement in <br /> the animal welfare problem here. There's sort of an idea that the government needs to <br /> solve it and that doesn't really work anywhere. It needs to be a collaborative effort with <br /> personal responsibility. And then our focus is really intake diversion programs so how do <br /> we best keep pets out of the shelters— keep them with their people— keep 'em with <br /> their colonies, etcetera. <br /> Task force— I'm gonna say this really fast cause I want to spend most of the time on our <br /> pet management plan. They had five community task force meetings where they looked <br /> at and sort of distilled out what the top four issues were that were identified that were <br /> repeating across all the districts. The view that there is overpopulation and lack of <br /> affordable, accessible spay/neuter. We've got some groups doing amazing work but it's <br /> not enough. Inhumane conditions for people, for pets and a lack of pet responsibility. I <br /> think there's a lot of when you know better you can do better. So, there's a big role for <br /> education to play in all of this and then education and lack of knowledge of how to find <br /> resources and services. Everything is extremely fragmented and that has to do a lot with <br /> how to just, where this organization is. The animal control division is relatively new. So, <br /> people just aren't sure who helps with what and then perceived lack of enforcement of <br /> laws no visibility of animal control responsiveness or access. Now, these were collected <br /> about a year ago, so, I believe about that last one, the County is really working hard to <br /> improve but here today I want to talk about community cats. I think, you know, a lot of <br /> 11 <br />