Five puppies are recovering after being left for dead in a garbage bag along a swampy ditch in Sydney.
Two teens made the startling discovery as they walked home from a hockey game Friday evening.
“It was really cold out so we decided to run home and we heard screaming, like the God-awful scream, and we looked around at first, we seen the bag, and it was moving,” says Taylor MacKenzie.
The teens say they were shocked to find six three-day-old puppies inside.
“Our friend went down and took the bag up onto the street and then I opened it,” says Kimberly Murphy.
Unknown to the girls, the road where the puppies were found is well-known for illegal dumping.
“There was two puppies in the beginning and then you open another bag and there’s four puppies lined up and one was dead,” says MacKenzie.
Shelly Cunningham of the Halifax rescue group Litters ‘n Critters says the puppies are in rough shape. When she saw them, she was worried they wouldn’t survive.
"They’re not out of danger by any means...the chances of these puppies surviving is very nil," says Cunningham.
She says the puppies have been moved to a special-care facility in Bedford where they will be hand-fed until they are strong and old enough to be adopted.
Since being found, a few have had their umbilical cords fall off.
The SPCA Animal Cruelty unit is now investigating. They are working with a description of a truck and its driver, given to them by Murphy and MacKenzie.
“It was old,” says MacKenzie about the truck. “It was baby blue-ish; rusty. It had a lot of equipment in the back.”
They say they didn’t get a good look at the male driver. But they say he looked middle-aged, mostly bald, with a bit of salt-and-pepper hair.
“We would do whatever we could to protect these puppies,” MacKenzie continues. “To find the person who would do that to them; we would recognize the truck instantly if we seen it again.”
With files from CTV Atlantic’s Ryan MacDonald.
