Sixteen abandoned puppies found dumped outside a Walmart store last month have all found homes – and the flood of attention helped the shelter’s long-overlooked adult dogs get adopted too.
Breann, who declined to share her last name, regularly helps catch stray and lost dogs around California’s Tri-Valley. But on July 8, she got a call from someone who’d found an unusually large group of puppies in a creek bed behind a Walmart in Livermore.
What she found when she got there was worse than she expected – 17 puppies in all, with one already killed by a car before help could arrive.
Breann brought a friend to help corral the surviving 16, then loaded them into two cars for the drive to safety.
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“They had big, wormy bellies, and it really broke my heart because you could tell they were skinny and they were just bloated for the most part,” she said.
“It’s definitely a lot of puppies all at once, it kind of felt like it was never gonna end,” she recalled. “When we were putting one by one into the truck, I was like, ‘And there’s more!'”
Breann said she wasn’t surprised by the size of the litter. She’s seen more and more abandoned animals around the Tri-Valley as the cost of spaying and neutering pets keeps climbing.
The puppies, believed to be one or two litters of 9-to-10-week-old Border Collie mixes, went to East Bay SPCA, which handles lost, injured and stray animals for the city of Livermore under contract. Staff split the group between the shelter’s Dublin and Oakland locations, then got to work on vaccinations, deworming and microchips, with extra socialization time from the behavior team for the shier pups.
“It’s no small feat,” said Jes Cytron, the shelter’s vice president of operations.
Cytron said waves of abandoned litters like this one usually come down to owners feeling stuck, not cruel.
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“People are really lacking the resources they need to take care of accidental or unwanted litters,” she said. “Oftentimes they may panic, they may not know we’re here to take in those animals.”
By Aug. 14, East Bay SPCA confirmed all 16 puppies had new homes.
The attention did something the shelter didn’t expect, Cytron said.
“We also had community members come in search of adult dogs,” she said, “and some of our long-term adult dogs also found homes.”
