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Dogfight: Ownership of beloved service poodle contested

Here's a sign of how serious Canine Partners for Life, of Cochranville, is about keeping track of the dogs it trains to serve disabled people.

Here's a sign of how serious Canine Partners for Life, of Cochranville, is about keeping track of the dogs it trains to serve disabled people.

The Chester County tax-exempt organization hired a private investigator to locate Livy, a standard poodle who was in service to a paraplegic in Weeki Wachee, Fla., about 50 miles north of Tampa, until the man died in November 2013.

Canine Partners found Livy, but the woman who had the dog, Hernando County Commissioner Diane Bennett Rowden, refuses to give her back to Canine Partners, claiming Thursday that she's fulfilling the deathbed wishes of Bruce Hicks, the man Livy had served since 2007.

The result is a legal dogfight.

The latest volley - prompted by Rowden's social media and Internet campaign to garner public support for her claim on Livy - is a defamation lawsuit filed this month by Canine Partners against Rowden in the Chester County Court of Common Pleas.

The lawsuit says that Canine Partners' Facebook page was deluged starting in late November "with hostile and rancorous posts" demanding that Rowden be allowed to keep the dog.

A website, "Help Us Save Livy," a "Save Livy" Facebook community, and a change.org petition have been also established to pressure Canine Partners.

The lawsuit demands a judgment of $100,000 plus punitive damages and costs, and calls for the removal of Rowden's "fabrications and false and/or intentionally damaging statements" from the Internet. In other words, call off the social media attack dogs.

Bruce Hicks lived in the Philadelphia area before moving to Florida in 2009, about two years after he received Livy, when the dog was about two years old.

Court records show that Hicks signed the organization's standard agreement requiring the dog to be returned to Canine Partners when Hicks died, unless some other arrangement had been made with the group.

The point of that stipulation is to ensure that the service dogs, which cost about $30,000 to train, do not end up in an animal shelter or face an even worse fate, the January lawsuit said.

Canine Partners, which was founded in 1989 and says it has placed more than 600 dogs, did not learn of Hicks' Nov. 4, 2013, death until December of that year, but the organization was in touch with Rowden starting in October because she was caring for Livy while Hicks was in the hospital and then in hospice.

Asked in an interview Thursday why she didn't tell Canine Partners that she had Livy, Rowden said she was afraid they would take the dog, which Hicks didn't want to happen, she said.

"I did what Bruce asked me to do. I made these promises on this man's death bed," she said.

The executor of Hicks' estate reached a settlement with Canine Partners for the return of the dog in November. Rowden drove as far a Washington - posting pictures of herself and the dog at the U.S. Capitol on Facebook - before turning around after hearing from an animal rights attorney that she doesn't have to return the dog.

Chances are, said Darlene Sullivan, Canine Partners' founder and executive director, that if Hicks and Rowden had followed the required procedure for determining what would happen to Livy after Hicks died, "she would probably have the dog right now legally and lawfully."

"To this day, she has never requested to adopt this dog from us," Sullivan said. "At this point, even if she asked, we wouldn't allow her to do it because she has been so dishonest and deceitful. That's not who we're going to place a dog with."

Sullivan dismissed the suggestion that donors to Canine Partners, which had $2.8 million in total revenue in fiscal 2014, would object to spending money on such a legal fight.

"In fact, our donors donate to Canine Partners because they understand that we are this committed to our dogs and feel such a responsibility to our dogs that we will go to this length to protect one of our dogs," she said.

hbrubaker@phillynews.com

215-854-4651

@InqBrubaker