Anyone would probably react if they suddenly found five puppies in their own backyard. And that’s exactly what Craig Mcgettrick experienced. He and a friend were clearing trash from a garden in England when they came across an old mattress. They had to lift the mattress to get rid of it – but they could never have imagined what was underneath. To his surprise, there were five tiny foxes under the mattress. After finding the puppies, Craig contacted a local animal shelter and posted some photos on Facebook in hopes that he could help find the puppies a new home. But just a few hours later, he would learn a surprising truth about the little puppies that changed everything… It was a day like any other in 2017.
Craig helped clean up the neighborhood. They were in the process of cleaning when they came across something he would never have guessed! Under a mattress, Craig found five that he thought were small puppies or perhaps kittens. “Those were probably the only two options I knew of,” Mcgettrick told The Dodo, adding: “We thought someone had put them down and knew we were going to remove the trash.” Craig decided to take the five little animals with him. He contacted a local animal shelter and asked them to care for the babies. But before handing them over to the shelter, Craig posted pictures on Facebook of the cute little “puppies” as he hoped to find a new owner. The photos were shared widely and after a while found their way to a man named Martin Hemmington, the founder of the National Fox Welfare Society.
As soon as he saw the pictures, he immediately picked up the phone and called Craig. But not because he wanted to adopt the puppies. “We were contacted by a lovely lady called Beccie via our Facebook page; “Beccie had sent some photos and asked if the babies in the photos were really fox pups,” Hemmington wrote in a Facebook post. “We confirmed that they certainly were. Beccie informed us that they had been mistakenly brought to a rescue center in Liverpool as puppies rather than fox pups.” What Craig thought were puppies turned out to be five small fox pups. “Fox pups don’t initially look like foxes when they’re small, so it’s common for people to confuse them with dog puppies,” said Paul McDonald, a local rescuer known as The Fox Man, The Dodo. Martin Hemmington turned to Paul and he made the little fox pups get a little hungry, which caused them to start calling for their mother. He then took them back to the same place where Craig had found the fox pups and carefully set them down.
Not long after, they saw a fox coming towards the puppies. The mother finally had her beloved little babies back. “Foxes leave their young in the den all the time, and as they get older they start to explore their surroundings more and more and become less dependent on mom as they get older,” said Paul McDonald. Thanks to Craig, Beccie, Martin and all the people who shared the photos, the mother fox finally got her beloved cubs back. Wonderful!
