No Littering? 11 Puppies Are Found by Trash

LAGUNA NIGUEL â€”  Dogs may be man’s best friend, but the relationship wasn’t mutual for 11 newborn Labrador puppies found dumped next to a trash bin in an apartment complex.

Eyes still closed and heaped inside a milk crate, the puppies were discovered last week by a passerby who notified the Mission Viejo Animal Shelter, which serves Laguna Niguel.

City animal control officers, who say the pups are in good health, are looking for help in finding the person who abandoned the animals.

“It would be very satisfying to find the person who did this, a real pleasure,� said Mike Westerland, a Mission Viejo animal control officer who stayed up all night caring for the puppies after rescuing them.

“They would face one count of [misdemeanor] abandonment of an animal for each one of the puppies--that’s 11 counts,� he said Wednesday.

Westerland, who estimates that the puppies were about 3 days old when they were found, said they were left at the Windridge Apartments, 24922 Hidden Hills Road, at Street of the Golden Lantern, sometime during the day last Thursday.

Like human babies, canine newborns need constant care, so the litter has been split up among three shelter volunteers who will foster the puppies for about six weeks, until they are old enough to be adopted.

“They have to eat around the clock,� said Sharon Cody, a former Mission Viejo City Council member who dubbed her charges Pepsi, Cola and Dr. Pepper “because they’re so sweet.�

“They’re so young they don’t look, and they make these little squealing noises like guinea pigs,� said Cody. “But they’re so cute, and they’re growing every day.�

Cody and other shelter workers said they can’t understand why the puppies were abandoned.

“I just can’t fathom how somebody could put them out like so much garbage next to a dumpster,� said Cody. “I can’t figure out why they would do something so terrible to these little babies.�

Workers at area shelters said they’ve seen animals left in strange places before, like on a freeway median and even inside a soft-drink machine. However, it’s rare for a shelter to get a large litter of newborn puppies.

“Fortunately, it’s very uncommon to have large litters left on our doorstep,� said John Gonzales, animal services supervisor for the Mission Viejo shelter.

Cats are also vulnerable to being dumped, said Gonzales. The county shelter picked up about 30,000 animals last year, and more than 12,000 of them were cats.

“It’s very common in cat season, starting in April and May, to see newborn kitten litters coming in constantly,� he said.

Abandoning newborn animals is particularly dangerous because they are susceptible to the weather.

“If they had been out [in the rain], we’d have had some very sick puppies on our hands,� said Cody. “Oftentimes pets that are abandoned are full of fleas, they’re malnourished or suffering from exposure.�

“Those [Labrador] puppies are in wonderful shape,� she said. “But if these little guys had been left outside overnight, it would have been a miracle for them to survive at all.�

Even abandoning a pet outside a shelter can be hazardous, particularly in Mission Viejo and San Clemente, where coyotes are a nuisance, said area shelter officials.

“There are a lot of coyotes in South County that will take cats and small dogs,� said Michele Stearns, general manager of the San Clemente Animal Shelter. “That’s why we get so worried about animals left outside our shelter.�

The plight of the puppies is a dramatic example of the need to spay and neuter pets, said Stearns.

Their abandonment “is a sign of irresponsible pet ownership, and it’s why we stress spay-neutering constantly,� she said. “It costs so little and is so easy to have pets spayed and neutered.�

Anyone with information about the puppies’ abandonment is asked to call the Mission Viejo shelter at (714) 470-3045. The shelter will begin accepting applications to adopt the puppies in about a month.