When most guys attend bachelor parties, the only thing they come home with is a nasty hangover, but groom-to-be Mitchel Craddock and seven of his friends each returned with an adorable puppy.
Craddock of Vicksburg, Michigan, took family and friends to the woods in Tennessee for a 5-day bachelor getaway, but on their first morning there, they noticed a dog outside the front door of their cabin. “We were cooking bacon with the door open. The next thing you know, there’s this dog sitting right at the front door. She wouldn’t come inside, but she sat right there,” he recalled in an interview. “She was very friendly but very skittish— I thought maybe she had been booted out of a house before.” The dog refused their repeated invitations to come inside, but the guys noticed that she was hungry and thirsty, so they offered her food and water, both of which she wolfed down almost instantly.
The dog was so well behaved that Mitchell and his friends were sure that she belonged to someone, but after their first encounter she remained at their cabin. “We’d ride for 4-5 hours, or go into town, and every time we’d come back she would either be sitting on our doorstep or under one of our trucks,” he told Mlive. He and his friends had noticed that the dog, which they had named Annie,after Little Orphan Annie, had had puppies, but her milk supply had apparently dried up. After three days of regular meals and lost of water, Annie started producing milk again, and seeing her running to the back of the cabin and barking in alarm every time a vehicle went down the road near the woodline, the guys decided to investigate.
While searching the area near the cabin, they discovered a wide underground den that had probably been dug up by a wild animal, and inside were seven adorable puppies. “We’re guessing they were maybe around 5 or 6 weeks old,” Mitchell said, adding that despite the obvious undernourishment of their mother, the pups were all healthy looking. “We were proud of her, she gave everything she had to those puppies.”
After making the discovery, the guys knew they couldn’t leave the adorable fur-balls behind. “Once we got the puppies out of the hole, we knew we couldn’t just leave them, so we started figuring out where they would go,” Craddock remembers. In the end they decided they would each adopt one of the puppies. “Thanks for coming to my bachelor party. Here’s a puppy,” the groom-to-be told his friends.
“You think of a bachelor party, and that’s the last thing you think of. Eight guys go down to go four wheeling and come back with eight dogs,” Mitchell said with a laugh.
Craddock’s grandparents took Annie, and one of the puppies, too, while he kept one of the puppies for his new home, after his wife-to-be, Kristen, insisted. The whole canine family was cleaned up, taken to the vet and on the night before Mitchell’s big day they were reunited at his house for a wedding rehearsal. “They were all playing together and glad to see each other,” he said. “I’m sure they’ll be life-long buddies. Just like all of us.”
Sources: Mlive, The Tennessean
