Everyone would probably react if they suddenly found five puppies in their own backyard. And that’s exactly Craig Mcgettrick’s experience too.

He was clearing waste out of a garden in England with a friend when they came across an old mattress. They needed to lift the mattress in order to get rid of it – but they could never have imagined what was under it.

To his surprise, five tiny puppies were lying under the mattress.

After finding the puppies, Craig contacted a local animal shelter and posted some photos on Facebook, hoping he could help find the puppies a new home.

But just hours later, he would learn a surprising truth about the little puppies, which changed everything..

It was a day like any other day back in 2017. Craig was helping his clean up the neighborhood. They were in the cleaning process when they came across something he never would have guessed!

Under a mattress, Craig found five of what he thought were little puppies or maybe kittens.

”Those were probably the only two options I knew of,” Mcgettrick told The Dodo and added, ”We thought someone had dumped them knowing we were going to remove rubbish.”

Craig decided to take the five little animals with him. He contacted a local animal shelter and asked them to take care of the babies. But before he handed them over to the shelter, Craig posted pictures on Facebook of the cute little ‘pups’ as he was hoping to find a new owner.

The photos were widely shared, and after a while, they found their way to a man named Martin Hemmington, founder of the National Fox Welfare Society.

As soon as he saw the pictures, he immediately got on the phone and called Craig. But not because he wanted to adopt the puppies.

“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,” Hemmington wrote in a Facebook post. “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.”

Facebook/Craig Mcgettrick
What Craig thought were puppies turned out to be five little fox cubs.

”Fox cubs don’t initially look like foxes when they are cubs, so it’s common for people to mistake them for dog puppies,” Paul McDonald, a local rescuer known as The Fox Man, told The Dodo.
Martin Hemmington reached out to Paul and he made sure the little fox cubs were somewhat hungry, which would cause them to start beeping for their mother.

Paul then took them out to the same place where Craig had found the fox cubs – and carefully put them back.

Not long after, they saw a fox approaching the cubs. Their mother had finally got her beloved little babies back.

“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,” 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!