Two former Victim Services Toronto employees are heading to court over pet ownership
The dog’s handler says a mutual agreement was reneged on
A case regarding who gets to own a retired trauma support dog will soon head to Toronto court.
Roman Dabrowski, a crisis support counsellor and the former handler of Dandy, an 11-year-old Labrador retriever, says Dandy should stay with him after he’s been the dog’s sole caregiver for the past six years. Dabrowski has lived full time with Dandy and worked with the dog to support hundreds of people through Victim Services Toronto, according to a Global News report.
Dabrowski says that many who know Dandy support him keeping the dog. “Neighbours, friends, Sunnybrook Hospital team, everybody sent letters in saying, ‘This is not right and she should stay with Roman.’”
Related: Dear Urban Diplomat—I adopted a dog to meet people, but people only like me for my dog
But Dandy’s original owner, Victim Services Toronto’s former interim executive director, Bobbie McMurrich, thinks the dog should stay with her. Dabrowski says it was a shock when McMurrich decided she wanted to keep Dandy, as according to Dabrowski, they’d had an agreement in which Dandy would stay with Dabrowski after retirement, which occurred in February of 2024.
“She said to me that she had no intention of taking Dandy on a full-time basis. She wanted to travel. She wanted to take care of her mother and she had things to do, so I thought, Perfect,” says Dabrowski in Global’s report.
In November of 2023, McMurrich informed Dabrowski that she wanted the dog after all, says Dabrowski.
The court case will commence in December.
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
