When you’re digging around in the garden, you expect to find all sorts of things like weeds, lots of dirt (duh!), maybe a garden snake, but mostly nothing of value. But that wasn’t the case for Craig Mcgettrick, a man who was busy performing a garbage removal job in England. He had been doing what he usually does in these types of jobs, but as he sifted through some junk, he discovered something that was absolutely amazing. He found what looked like a bunch of puppies, but it turned out that there was more to these adorable pups than actually met the eye.As he lifted an old mattress, he was shocked to find five tiny puppies that had been abandoned, but he was so stunned, he wasn’t sure what to do at first. Then he and his co-workers decided to take the puppies to the nearest shelter.
Someone saw the pups and reached out to the National Fox Welfare Society. That’s when Martin Hemmington, the society’s founder, got a message with Mcgettrick’s photos from a woman named Beccie asking him if the puppies were actually fox cubs.
Beccie had explained how the fox cubs had been confused for puppies and taken to a shelter in Liverpool. Then Hemmington reached out to the shelter to make sure that the fox cubs could get sent back to the wild.
McDonald’s expertise with animals would be instrumental in working with Hemmington to find a way to return these fox cubs back to their native habitat. McDonald also pointed out that fox cubs don’t look like foxes when they’re newborn. So being confused for puppies was an honest mistake.
The brown color on the fox cubs’ fur was normal because they were young, and McDonald pointed out that this is what led to the misunderstanding that the cubs were puppies, when they were in fact a totally different species.
Mother foxes, which are known as vixens, tend to leave their cubs alone in the den while they presumably go out to find food. Then, as the cubs get older, they’ll start to venture out and explore the area around their den.
Hemmington knew that the cubs had to be returned to their den, and it would be up to McDonald to do this before the mother returned. Otherwise, the vixen might presume that her young were lost and move on.
McDonald had also included a hot water bottle, but they didn’t feed the cubs. They figured that if they were hungry enough, they would call out and that their mother would come looking for them and provide them with nourishment.
Then she realized that the other cubs were in the box, but she waited until it was nighttime before getting the other cubs out. She probably did this because she assumed it wasn’t safe to do so during the day. McDonald then confirmed that the fix fox cubs were safely reunited with their mom.
