Animal Control Officer Norma Van Zant drove down 14th Avenue, hoping the call was wrong.

The men and women with Kings County Animal Services are used to finding dumped animals. That doesn’t make it any easier to roll up on seven puppies left unceremoniously on Kansas Avenue.

This was worse than a normal dumping, though.

She had to drive up and down the road several times to locate them. That’s because someone had covered them with a yellow tarp to keep them hidden. Van Zant pulled it back to find seven puppies crammed into a small rabbit cage barely big enough to house half their number.

The dogs were so tightly packed they could barely move, let alone lay down, or get comfortable. They were still trying, though, and that made it worse.

“It just breaks your heart to see this,” Van Zant told The Sentinel on Friday. “We’re all animal lovers down here, and I just don’t understand how someone can do this. Just dump them out like trash.”

She got the call in the morning on Aug. 6. Someone reported to dispatch that a man in a beat-up camper trailer had pulled over near Kansas and left a cage of puppies on the ground.

“They weren’t out there terribly long,” Van Zant said. “Thank goodness someone saw them. Otherwise, they would’ve been out in the hot sun.”

She brought them in to Animal Services, where they were housed and fed. The puppies were so hungry, they practically inhaled their food.

“They ate it so fast, we think they might’ve been left in that cage overnight before they got dumped,” she said.

But rescuing the animals from their cage was just half of the problem.

Each dog looked to be a Labrador mix, with a little shepherd cross and husky mixed in. All of them cute, all of them friendly, and all of them destined to grow into fairly large dogs.

And, unfortunately, large dogs do not get adopted often in Kings County, Van Zant said.

So Animal Services Director Teri Rockhold sent out a call for help from no-kill animal shelters all across the state. She included a picture of the seven pups stuffed in their cage – left over from Van Zant’s initial investigation – to help their plight.

Rescue arrived this Friday in the form of a Bay Area animal lover who volunteered to fly all seven puppies to the Big Dawgs Rescue in Pleasanton, where foster families await each of them.

“We do everything we can to get the dogs out of here,” Van Zant said. “We take in everything because we have to, but we also have to euthanize when we can’t hold on to them any longer. But when we can get a nice friendly dog to a no-kill shelter, or to a shelter where they stand a better chance of getting adopted, we do it.”

The puppies wagged their tails happily as they were each loaded into the plane. Cindy Smith, a Pilots and Paws member, said she was just glad to help out.

“This is a great way for people like me to get involved,” said Smith, who works as a mortgage consultant in Pleasanton when she isn’t flying animals to freedom. “People are willing to drive them, but it takes a lot of time and it’s very stressful. This way, the dogs can go to sleep and get there in just an hour.”

For Van Zant, it was great just to see the dogs she rescued leave to find a good home.

“It makes me happy to see them get out,” Van Zant said as she helped load the dogs into the plane. “My heart goes out to them. They didn’t do anything wrong. This is a good happy ending.”

The reporter can be reached at 583-2425. Article written by Joe Johnson/ Hanford Sentinel