Lost and found and lost again
The Daniels desperately want their dog back. But his adoptive family can’t bear to give him up
On good days, Karl Daniels misses the clickety-clack of the dog’s nails across the wooden floor. On bad days, he asks, “Where’s the dog?” Daniels, 80, has dementia, daughter Michelle explains. The dog he asks about is Kimbo, a 10-year-old brown and brindle miniature pinscher boxer mix — and he went missing about eight weeks ago.
The Daniels want Kimbo back, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.
He’s now living with another family, who got him through the Toronto Humane Society, and they told the agency they’ve grown too attached to the dog to return him.
Karl doesn’t remember much. But he remembers Kimbo.
The doig was his one constant companion, Michelle says. “Dad will call for him,” she says. A retiree and father of six who grew up in Nova Scotia, Karl always had a dog as long as Michelle remembers.
On Aug. 28, Kimbo scampered out when the screen door at their home shut slowly as a personal support worker walked in.
Michelle didn’t think too much about it at the time because “the dog knows where he lives” and she thought he would come back. But he didn’t. That night, when he still hadn’t returned, she drove around their North York neighbourhood in a panic, calling out for the animal.
“I hoped someone else found him and reported him,” she says.
Someone did. Earlier that Sunday at the Toronto Humane Society, someone dropped off a stray, says the society’s director of communications, Makyla Deleo.
Two days after Kimbo slipped out, Michelle says she called the humane society, looking for her lost dog.
She filed a missing dog complaint with Toronto Animal Services.
Meanwhile, at the humane society, Kimbo was being looked at. Deleo outlines the steps taken: his picture was taken immediately on arrival and posted on the lost section of their website. He was found to be in good health. And Kimbo was now christened Turner.
“He must have gotten out of his collar,” Michelle says. “He always did that.”
Kimbo was put in the stray hold for dogs for five days, as is required in Toronto, which did not include the day of arrival or any non-business days, Deleo explains.
Weeks later, alerted to Kimbo’s new location by someone who saw his profile on the Helping Lost Pets website, Michelle rushed to the Humane Society.
But Kimbo, a.k.a. Turner, had been adopted by another family on Sept. 17. Michelle was two days too late.
“At that point, there was nothing that we can legally do,” Deleo says. “We went above and beyond.”
Deleo says the humane society contacted the individual who adopted the animal and let them know that Turner had been someone else’s pet.
“The person who adopted Turner is not interested in returning him,” Deleo explains. Michelle says she offered to pay for the adoption and cover all costs incurred by the new owners, but to no avail.
The new owners had him for three days and they say they are attached — we had him for 10 years, she says.
Her sons, Kaiyn, 13, and Tres, 4, also miss Kimbo, she adds.
But it is her father’s loss that is uppermost in her mind.
Karl asks if one of his grandsons is walking the dog, she says. “He doesn’t realize that the dog’s not here . . . doesn’t remember all of it.”