Family’s Rescued Puppy Turns Out Not To Be A Puppy At All

A family in Whitehorse, Canada found a small abandoned puppy in the woods and rescued the baby animal. At least, that’s what they thought they had found. But it turns out the tiny fuzzy baby was definitely not a dog.

Ralph Shopland and his family found the hurt animal alone near Marsh Lake. “I just defaulted to thinking it was a dog,” Ralph Shopland told CBC News in 2014 when they found it. The family turned to Facebook to ask for help and a wetnurse.

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Photo credit: CBC

For a few days the “pup” had a surrogate but they soon determined the little one wasn’t a pup at all. They thought it maybe was a baby otter or maybe a wolverine, but the staff at Yukon Wildlife Preserve eventually determined it was a fox! The first sign was the white tip on his tail.




“Once his ears stood up and his face changed and the smell became really obvious,” Maria Hallock, the wildlife curator at the Yukon Wildlife Preserve told CBC.

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Photo credit: Yukon Wildlife Preserve

They nursed the little guy back to health and because he was imprinted on humans he ended up staying at their wildlife preserve. They didn’t have the proper habitat for the red fox, but after a successful fundraising campaign they were able to build him one.

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Photo credit: Yukon Wildlife Preserve

The red fox is now fully grown and just last month (April 2015) got to explore the new habitat that was built just for him!

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Photo credit: Yukon Wildlife Preserve

He is the Yukon Wildlife Preserve‘s first red fox and joins the moose, mouton goats, caribou, arctic fox, snowshoe hares and other wildlife they have on their 700 acres of land.

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Photo credit: Yukon Wildlife Preserve

Here’s a news video made a month after the fox’s initial rescue, by which time they definitely knew he was a fox!

Share this unusual wildlife rescue with your friends and family!

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