 Okay, welcome back. I'm Jay Fidel. This is ThinkTech. More specifically, this is Community Matters because community does matter. And one of the pillars of our community is the Humane Society. And we have here the CEO and president of the Humane Society and a new bower. Welcome to the show. And it's so nice to see you and meet you. Hi, thank you so much. It's really nice to be here. I appreciate the opportunity. Yeah. You know, you've been on the job from Denver, six or seven or eight months now. Yeah. And you were a veterinary specialist, a technician in Denver, is that right? So I left Denver as a director of operations, or vice president of operations at the Dumb Friends League. I am a certified veterinary technician, so I have a strong veterinary background. Yeah, I was telling you before the show, there's two kinds of people in the world. One is the kind of like animals and the others. We don't talk to them. So you're obviously, you know, in the category of people that like animals and must say everybody I know that has animals is in that category is wonderful. And so you came here and joined an organization which had a certain amount of tumultuousness going on. And I suppose, you know, just meeting you, I suppose it didn't take you too long to settle that down. Am I right? No, there's a lot that the organization went through last year as I'm sure everyone is aware. And a lot of things needed to happen right so first and foremost we needed to look at our structure and our framework and kind of get all of the pieces in place to help us move forward. And there's quite the, quite the list of things to do, but we have a full leadership team now. And so we're, we're moving forward in a really nice way. You're very important to the community. I mean to all the people in the community who not only have animals but love animals and need animals for their daily life, you know, as the city gets more complex, maybe more crowded, it becomes more important. It was always important in Hawaii, I would say Hawaii is essentially a agricultural mindset. Hawaii is a place on a loa where people need to have Ohana and part of the Ohana is the animals. So you're very important. Anyway, I wanted to ask you, you know, how it was going in the time of COVID because you're here long enough to settle things down and then bang, get COVID. Well, you know, just when just when you thought it was safe to go outside COVID. So tell us about how it came upon you and the Humane Society back what January, February, March, whenever. Yeah, so middle of March. You know, we have been watching the situation unfold really closely, listening to national guidelines what's happening across the country with animal welfare, and then paying close attention obviously to our local community, what what's coming out at the state level as the city and county level. And the middle of March came as everyone's aware, and it changed everybody's world here. So we responded appropriately we essentially completely altered how we operate on campus, we had those that could work from home work from home. The rest of our team was able to continue to work on campus to care for the animals, but we switched to being appointment based only keeping socially distant from each other, we switched to a team schedule. We made a huge call out to the community to help support animals during this time and oh my gosh everybody stepped up so generously and we are emergency fostering program was hugely successful during this time and really helped us move forward and make sure that the animals had everything they need. Well, let me unpack some of that. So how, how it's really critical that you have somebody to feed the animals. Without that you're, oh my God, that's awful thought. So, but it doesn't take that many people. On the other hand, you've got to get the food. So how, how did that change. I guess that the staff, mostly that you're talking about the one who is now on a kind of rotation or appointment basis. They were dealing with the public, am I right, or the administration of the organization, but the animals, the animals required the same before and after right. So the animals, we still had animals coming in, we still had animals in our care and they all required daily and sometimes hourly care from our teams and so we had our animal care team that takes care of the feeding and cleaning of the animals the daily enrichment for the animals. And then our veterinary team and our behavior team that supports the other components to animal welfare. And we, and those teams stayed, stayed busy during this time because again we see animals coming in in a variety of conditions. And they needed the care so our medical team switched their schedules but maintained a presence here every single day of the week in order to care for the animals. Yeah, I think one thing I'd like to emphasize in our discussion is that people see the Humane Society is a place where you drop off your animal when you can't take care of many more. Or that you select another animal to bring home with you, but they don't realize a lot of animals are not not well and require medical care, and you have to have a sophisticated medical system there. And so you got to have veterinarians, you got to have veterinarians there to handle them to do your job. How does that interact with the veterinarians out in the community, because they do essentially the same thing, except what, what's the difference between the Humane Society, a veterinary and the Humane Society taking care of animals and one in the community as a private practitioner in veterinary medicine. Yeah, that's a great question Jay so typically the veterinarians that are working in shelters are practicing shelter medicine. And so a lot of that is based on volume right we're seeing typically many more patients per veterinarian per day here in this environment than you would in private practice. Some of our approaches are a little bit different than private practice because you have an owner dedicated to an animal, able to do different things making decisions for that animal whereas we're needing to figure out we don't have that owner to tell us what's going on we have to determine what's going on based solely on the examination and the diagnostic tests were able to do. And so sometimes the puzzle becomes a little more complex for our team here. That's the thing about animals they just don't speak up. So it's actually, you don't have the benefit of an owner who has observed the animal. And it can tell you what is bothering the animal or at least his observation or her observation. This case you have to figure it out it's it's more difficult. Yeah, and then we do quite a bit of surgeries here as well so typically our veterinarians are doing about 30 surgeries every day here whereas in private practice it's more along the lines and typically about five or six. So it does look very different from that regard as well. I think that may have said that are also practicing out there in the community has come in part time and is that what it is what do you have a permanent veterinary staff. We do have a permanent veterinary staff but we also work with local veterinarians that come in and help support our needs through relief work. We also have volunteer veterinarians and then for any specialized work that we need done for any patients we actively work with some of the specialty clinics to help support that. So let's let me take a look at the community through the lens. I suppose you can do this all the time whether you call it or not. You can sort of take take the temperature of the community through the lens of the main society. You can see how things are doing out there by what comes in what goes out. And you know your interaction with the community people like me. So for example you know the ebb and flow of it you have people bringing pets in. Has that changed since March? Has it changed since people got locked down in their houses and apartments? It has changed. So some of our structural changes that we made during this time was to support the stay at home orders. And so we were operating by appointment for emergency needs only at a certain point. Again to help people stay at home providing resources and if that animal needed any kind of emergency help or if that person wasn't able to keep that animal we would of course take the animal and support the needs of that animal. But really trying to support the stay at home orders. We made the changes we made to be by appointment only. It was essentially a drive through service where people would park their cars, give us a call, let them know that they're here for their appointment or they're here to walk in. And then we would support that through socially distant measures. Were you treated as an essential service? Yes. Okay. Yeah, and you know the other thing is and I don't think it happened all that much in Hawaii but that, again, through the winds of the Humane Society, the community had more than its earlier share of domestic violence. People get cooped up they climb the walls. But there was some news that it was happening here and more news that it was happening on the mainland of a pretty serious violence. And I wonder if that kind of experience that kind of phenomenon affects the animals to because they live in the same house, sometimes in the same room. Yeah. What's your view of that through the lens of the Humane Society. It certainly does. From my understanding, we haven't received any specific requests to support victims of domestic violence and their animals. We do offer those services when they're needed from time to time through our foster care program, but we, we didn't see any specific requests, at least yet to support that right now. Okay, we're good. I'm happy to hear that. Yes. I always worry that pets, pets are pets will always love you. Yes. Sometimes they go ahead. All right, victims oftentimes will as just as with their children will will hesitate to leave a situation because of the animals as well and so if they know they have a safe place for their animals or their children, that allows that separation to occur, which is nice. Yeah. Well, then that is the issue of adopting pets in the ordinary times. People come and I've been there. Everybody I know has been there, you know, walking down that row of dogs, who only want to be adopted as their biggest and cats who only want to be adopted biggest desire in life. And they really need, they need to connect with someone, you can see it. And the question is, have you been able to do that. I guess by appointment only but how has it changed in terms of the experience of the animals and the people who adopt them. Yeah, so with with the appointments only and wanting to keep numbers down on campus. So we're not having a large crowds gathering. And I've done essentially more of a concierge service where people call in, we talk to them about what they're interested in they may have seen an animal online on our website that they that they like and would like to see or would like to adopt. We talk them through their history as much as we know it, and then provide information to them to help them make a decision on if that's an animal they'd be interested in adopting and if so, then we schedule their pickup appointment. And once they're here they give us a call we come out to the car help them fill out finish the finalize the paperwork and bring them their animal. Wow, that's like, that's like picking up a pizza. Hopefully better curbside service. Yes. Hopefully better. On your website can we can we drill down on your website. We don't have a picture of it. But what what is it like and how do you handle the presentation of the animals who are available for adoption. Yeah, so we have. We've always had an adoptions page which lists the animals that are available for adoption with their picture, a couple photos and some information. And then we have to create a secondary page for the animals that were available in foster homes to list their information as well as their just more about them and their pictures and if there's any videos and things like that so our foster parents got really engaged in that process, and shot some fantastic photos of their little foster buddies during this time and so that's been really helpful. Let's just stop for a moment and ask you about foster homes. I knew there were foster homes for children, but I did not know there were foster homes from pets. Can you talk about this program how it works. Absolutely. So animal shelters across the country just like ours rely on foster homes for many reasons even in in normal times. Some of those that come into the shelter that will benefit from a foster home for a variety of reasons so perhaps they're underage and just need a couple of weeks to mature until they're old enough to be spayed or neutered and find their new home. Other times they may have gone through an orthopedic surgery here and need a couple of weeks to recover in a foster home. Perhaps we need a little bit more information about them. So we would send them to a foster home to sort of monitor, you know, their eating habits or just their behavior in general. Certainly right now we put a big request out for foster homes just to help support the numbers of animals we had in our care. Right now you have more pets out there in foster homes than ordinarily. Interesting. And in the human foster home, they get paid. A foster parent gets paid. Is that so in an animal foster home? That's not the same. So there are foster parents or volunteers and they're doing this work out of the goodness of their heart. So we so appreciate all that they do because it really is life changing for these animals. Yeah, again, animal people. Yeah, I would imagine there's a lot of people in this city and probably across the state who haven't had any money. And who have, you know, felt that they got to cut costs, they can't pay the rent and you know other expenses. And they never got federal money to help them through that, at least not yet. And I wonder if that has affected the ebb and flow of pets who are brought to you and pets who are adopted out from you, or whether people are conducting themselves in the same way that they conducted themselves before. I think for the most part, you know, people are adhering to stay at home order. So some of the animals are not coming to us for that reason. And, and we're really trying to create programs and provide services that help people and animals stay together. And so with the economic downturn that so many people have been facing. We have really stood up our pet food bank and have been working closely with several human service partners in the community to make sure that people are able to feed their animals and keep their families intact. And so far today we've distributed over 16,000 pounds of pet food. Wow. You don't do that ordinarily but you're doing it now is that it. We do offer a pet food bank ordinarily but not to the same volume that we're seeing right now. And that helps to ameliorate problems that might otherwise arise in a, in a household with no income. Absolutely. Absolutely. So many generous community members donate pet food for our pet food bank to help support the people in their pets, which is great. That's great. How about contributions to you and you're a nonprofit. And, you know, you have to raise money from the public. And of course the public has supported you for many years. But I wonder if that income stream has been affected by COVID. It certainly has. We've seen some, you know, routine monthly donors need to drop off because of financial situations. We had to unfortunately postpone our largest fundraiser in April because it's a large gathering. And so that impacted us as well. And when we are starting to see that downturn in some of the smaller donations that we frequently rely on every month, not coming as as frequently because people are being hard hit. Oh gee, I'm sorry to hear that. Every nonprofit has the risk of that. Yeah. And I wondered, did you, did you cancel that fundraiser or just postpone it? Are you going to, are you going to have it sometime later? I don't know the size of the group we did make the decision to cancel it. And so it's, we have it scheduled for next year with, with hopes that COVID will, will no longer be quite the risk that it is today. Hope so, but that's just, there's a sophisticated answer actually, because we, we really don't know, do we? We're going to be so people have to understand that we're not out of the woods on this yet. So when I, when I have dealt with the Humane Society, one of the most notable things was that the Humane Society would have me in a class, and I would bring my little puppy in. And we would, the puppies would play with each other, which is really important. They would socialize, they would socialize with, with other puppies and other people. And this would make them into nice puppies. So, and it was a great service, a number of occasions. So query, are you still doing that? Can you still do that? Would you do that? How do you handle that problem? That's a great question. We, so that's, was not a service that we were providing when I started eight months ago. And that, that is something that we are likely to look into further obviously right now anything that requires a group setting will have to be postponed for a little while longer. So in a way we can figure out some of these things, either to do virtually or safely in person, we're going to look into that for sure. You know, one of the issues that was raised last, last year, 2019, which led to the tumult at Humane Society was euthanasia policies. Can you talk about that? How has, how have those policies changed? How has COVID changed them? Yeah, so it's a really good question. And I think a lot has changed for this organization over the last year. We have seen a 95% turnover rate last since last year. So there is virtually almost all brand new people here. There was a deep dive into all of the procedures, practices, protocols that we had to take a look and see where we were landing with, with national standards, best practices and those sorts of things. And through all of that, different, different ways of operating are in process. Some things take longer than others. COVID-19 has certainly slowed down a couple of things, but has sped up other ways of operating in some regards, which has been nice to see. So looking at the programs that we didn't have in place that we needed to, we didn't have a really large foster program, particularly for underage kittens. And that's something that we have developed and are in process of refining right now and creating a good system for that, for all the underage kittens that we see. What's an underage kitten? How young is an underage kitten? That's a great question. A kitten that's not weaned from its mother, less than eight weeks old. An eight week old kitten can be adopted to a new home. They're old enough, mature enough to not need their mothers anymore. But they're not yet, yeah, but if they're not yet weaned, then they're very vulnerable. Exactly. Unless they get a lot of love and attention, they're not, they're not going to have a good life. Yeah. Correct. Yeah. So a lot of those little guys just naturally don't have good success stories, particularly when they're born outside. And obviously the elements play a role, sickness and disease play a role. If anything happens to the mom cat, that plays a role. And so oftentimes we see these really young kittens coming in without mothers and they take a lot of care. They need to be fed every four hours. And so you have to have a really strong foster program set up in order to be able to do that. Well, you know, I want to talk to you about the, you know, the relationship of the pet and the owner and the community. You know, I mentioned, I think that Hawaii is very sort of loving of pets. I may be wrong about that. You've been in various places in the country and I wonder if you ever thought about that, whether Hawaii is, you know, just like other places or is it different in that way? I have seen so many animal loving people since I've been here. I think it is, it mirrors so many communities across the country. Animals are important to all of us wherever we live. And that's, that is definitely true here. The human animal bond is a unique bond that we share with our animal companions. And it is definitely prevalent in this community. What about animal cruelty? I mean, humane society, part of its mission is to deal with that. And sometimes it's hard to deal with it, yeah. It is, we do, you know, unfortunately, we do see some pretty terrible things. You know, our hope is that we can continue to work and strengthen laws to make it harder and have higher penalties when animal cruelty does exist in the world. You know, there is a significant link to human abuse from animal cruelty. If you are willing to abuse an animal, you're very likely willing to abuse a human, and sometimes worse. And so there's a strong link there and if we can strengthen some of our laws, we can help prevent, I think, devastating situations for animals as well as for people. Do you get money from the legislature to assist you in missions like that? Not from the legislature, no. Not purely a non-profit. We have a contract with the city and county for the animal care and control services. Okay. So I want to ask you also, and now that you've been weaned. You know, through your, or deal by fire in the COVID, in the COVID time, you know, it's a terrible question. Forgive me for this question. What's your, what's your plan? What's your plan as a CEO? What's your plan for the organization? It's nothing is static. Everything changes and everything requires a plan. Absolutely. And we're actively working on those every single day. So as, as you said, nothing is static. So our team and, and everyone has been incredibly flexible during this time, but moving forward, we're going to need to continue to be. So we're, you know, we're going into the next phase of our operations, right? And with that, you know, my caveat is always, we have to continue to be flexible. Orders may change at the state or city and county level. You know, we really don't know what to expect, but right now with COVID-19 our job is to mitigate risk for our, the public or our volunteers for our staff and everybody that that interacts with us on a daily basis. And so we're going to have that in mind as we move forward, but larger picture for the organization. It's really about continuing to strengthen our foundation and move us forward into all of those best practices for animal welfare. When you expand, when you develop new, new facilities, new, new locations. Yes, we are looking at the West side. There's more to come there. So we'll probably have some additional announcements later this year beginning of next year. But there, there is a need on our island for additional services. And so we're looking to expand over to the West side. You know, one thing I want to ask, which actually there was an article in the paper about this, not too long ago. It wasn't about COVID, but it was about some other human disease. It was the bacterial disease. And what the article reported that there was a family, it was strep, strep. That's bacterial, isn't it? Yeah. And the family kept on getting strep. And they didn't know what it was. They take antibiotics and, and that would contain that would stop the strep. And they said a few weeks later, their kids would get sick again and went on and on and on. But nobody thought nobody wanted to approach the issue of whether their pets were carrying strep. And finally, in the end, it was determined that although the, although it was hard to identify the strep on the pet, there was strep on the pet. And the pet was carrying the strep and infecting them, reinfecting multiple. And, and once they decided that it was not a problem because they just gave the pet antibiotics to kill the strep. But until they found that, you know, and this raises the whole question of whether there is a danger, I'm sure you can help me with this. There are some pet owners by virtue of strep or anything else, including COVID and other viruses from pets that you have in your house. I'm sure that every pet owner in the state has asked himself, hmm, you know, is my pet at risk? Am I at risk for my pet now in the time of this mysterious virus? What do you say to them? So they're looking, looking at sort of national information and what's happening across the globe. You were trying to stay as connected as possible with the most up to date information. And the CDC publishes updates as well, which is a great resource for everybody to look at. As of right now, there are no known cases of our pets giving us COVID, which is great. So we do hope that continues. We're watching closely as, as we all know, COVID is a novel virus. We don't know what to expect long term with this. So everyone's paying a really close attention to what's happening and really tracking cases. There have been a couple of publicized cases of cats felines getting contracting COVID. In some fashion, I'm sure you read the New York Times article about the, I think it was the Bronx Zoo and the Tigers. Again, right now there is no evidence that our animals can give it to us, which is, which is good news. There is, you know, potential that we could give it to them. And so that's what we're watching closely. So if we do get any animals that come to us that need temporary housing from a COVID-19 positive patient, we are isolating them as a precaution to make sure that we're following best practices. Well, that's very interesting. I have this vision, pardon me, the humor, but I have this vision of a, of a dog wearing a mask. If only they would leave it there. Well, it's been great to talk to you. I really enjoyed meeting you and hearing about the Humane Society. I'm sure we'll meet in person one of these days because I am a dog lover. I could not live on this planet without a dog to take care of me. Thank you so much, Jay. Aloha. See you soon.