Good Samaritan finds 17 puppies in Livermore store parking lot

When word came that more than a dozen puppies had been found abandoned in a Livermore parking lot Wednesday afternoon, the Oakland and Dublin campuses of the East Bay SPCA had to hurry to get ready.

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“We’ve got to start clearing kennels, we’ve got to start making 16 bowls of food,” Lisa Hammock, shelter manager of the Oakland campus. “It was a bit of a hustle, but when you hear about a giant litter of animals that need help, you heart tells you you want to help.”

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The group of nine-week old puppies were found by a good Samaritan — who saw one animal struck fatally by a car, said Victoria Ivankic, spokesperson for the East Bay SPCA. The woman who found the dogs brought the surviving 16 puppies to the SPCA’s two campuses in Oakland and Dublin, where they are now recovering from their ordeal, and may be available for adoption as soon as next week.

“We were all really enthusiastic about actually getting these animals into a safe environment, especially when we had heard that there were originally 17,” Hammock added. “We knew we had to hustle to be able to get these animals into a safe space and full bellies and a warm bed to sleep in at night.”

The group of puppies — the largest litter the East Bay SPCA has received in recent memory, Hammock said — likely all comes from the same mother due to their similar appearances and ages, she added.

“It is an awful lot of puppies,” she added. “If it’s more than one litter, then it would be two moms with the same dad. These animals — all of them look so similar, and they are all about the same weight and their teeth … (are) coming in about the same.

“That leads us to believe that they are all one litter,” she added.

When ten puppies arrived at the Oakland shelter Wednesday evening, they were nervous and needed to be cleaned, Hammock said. Then they were separated out into smaller groups to go into kennels with their litter mates. By Thursday, the staff was able to clear out a larger space to hold all ten puppies together.

“There’s plenty of toys and beds for them to all lay in, and they are so cute. They will just all pile up and have this adorable cuddle puddle,” Hammock said. “Just heads and feet and tails, and it’s just so adorable. They’re all piled on sleeping together with little tiny puppy snores.”

The puppies have been given temporary “troublemaker-ish” names like Hijinks and Antics, Hammock added.

The puppies are in “overall good health” with “fairly positive” body condition but were “very hungry” when they arrived at the shelter, Ivankic said. Some of the dogs had swollen bellies, which is typically indicative of worms, a common ailment for puppies.

“That was probably the extent of our concern up to this point,” Ivankic said. “Of course, they’ll need to have their vaccines and spay, neuter, all of the typical things that we give an animal.”

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The most pressing concern for the litter now is their socialization, Ivankic said. While some of the dogs are exhibiting behavior that is “bright and friendly and outgoing,” others came into the shelter “more shy and shut down” and have been “hiding in the corners,” she added.

“At that age, sometimes it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s just a shy puppy,’ and other times it’s like, ‘Okay, we have a very small window to get their socialization in order,’ ” she said.

Socializing the puppies falls to the behavioral team, who works to “make sure that their social skills are leading them towards adoption candidacy,” Ivankic said. That involves ensuring that the animals respond well to people and other animals.

“Do they guard their food? Do they get kind of snippy with toys and things?” Ivankic said. “The piece that the public might not always see is when they’re really shy and shut down and, like, nose right into a corner, that is concerning because you don’t really know how they’re feeling, you don’t know if they’re going to open up.”

But the puppies have already been making improvements in their first few days with the SPCA.

To attempt to liven shyer puppies up, the team has been reintroducing those puppies to “sourdough starters” – their more outgoing brothers and sisters – to see if that would “bring them out of their shell,” Ivankic said.

When all the Oakland puppies were brought together in a room on Thursday, “sure enough, the shyer guys kind of opened right up to them,” she added.

“That’s exactly what we want to see,” she said.

Hammock added that the SPCA does not want to “blame or vilify” anyone for leaving the dogs but emphasized that the local animal shelter is always a resource for help instead of “feeling like (the) only answer maybe is to let animals go in the middle of a parking lot.”

The puppies will need to be spayed and neutered before they go up for adoption, but the shelter anticipates that some may be available for adoption as early as Wednesday, Hammock said. The shelter has already received an influx of community members calling and expressing interest in the puppies.

“That has been so inspiring, and the team here just loves having that,” she added. “We know that then these pups are going to be able to find great homes.”

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