Craig Mcgettrick wanted to help make the neighborhood look a little nicer, so he decided to clean out a local garden. As he was cleaning, he found what he thought was a little of puppies.
They were recently born and were very tiny.
He wasn’t sure why their mother would have left them alone and worried that maybe she had abandoned them or that something had happened to her. Craig and his friend Beccie decided to put the puppies in a cardboard box and take them to a nearby rescue facility, Freshfields Animal Rescue, in Liverpool, England.
They shared a photo online, and eventually, it made its way around the internet.
When the founder of the National Fox Welfare Society, Martin Hemmington, saw the photo, he called the shelter and let them know that those were not puppies. They were baby foxes. He said:
“We were contacted by a lovely lady called Beccie through our Facebook Page; Beccie had sent a few photos asking if the babies in the photos were indeed fox cubs. We confirmed they certainly were. Beccie advised us that they had been taken to a rescue center in Liverpool mistakenly as puppies, not fox cubs.”
Many people were confused by why the mother would leave the baby foxes.
They felt that even though Craig and Beccie had mixed up the foxes for puppies, they still likely saved their lives because their mother had abandoned them. Hemmington explained:
“Vixens leave their cubs all the time whilst they are in the den, and as they get older they’ll begin to explore their surroundings more and more, and become less dependent on mum as they get older.”
The shelter allowed Hemmington to take care of the foxes. He decided that the best thing to do was to bring the fox cubs back to the garden where their mother could find them. He was hoping that the mother didn’t leave and was still nearby searching for her babies. He volunteered to try to reunite the family. He said:
“I didn’t give the cubs any milk in order for them to be hungry, so they’d cry out and call for their mum, which they did. I put them around the same place they were found, as I knew the mum would be looking for them, and she’d be checking the place she last had them.”
The mother did come back to find the cubs.
She took one and took off with it. They waited on her to get the others, but she didn’t come back. Hemmington assumed she would come back that night and get the others. That’s exactly what she did, too. He said:
“I believe once she’d picked the first one up and knew the others were safe in the box, she waited until it got dark to get the rest as she must not have felt safe moving the cubs in daylight.”
The fox babies weren’t away from their mother for very long, and she was happy to have them back with her.
Since they were so hungry, she was able to find them easily and feed them. Now, the family has been reunited thanks to the help of the kind people who rescued them and then returned them.
Beccie and Craig don’t regret rescuing the fox cubs. They just confused them for puppies. Luckily, there was an expert who saw the photos and was willing to help set things straight. Now, these foxes can grow up in the garden and have babies of their own.
If you find baby animals, it is best to observe them before you try to move them.
Some types of animals will leave their babies for small periods of time during the day to hunt for food. They will return later to care for them. It’s better to make sure the animals have been abandoned before you move them, so they don’t have to be reunited, like these fox cubs.
Please SHARE this with your friends and family.
After a rubbish removal job we unearthed a pile of rubbish and these little pups appeared in the rubbish we have taken them to an animal sanctuary so they have a chance to survive
Posted by Craig Mcgettrick onTuesday, March 14, 2017
