MLive: Guys adopt stray dog and puppies that crash bachelor party

VICKSBURG, MI - Some fellows go to a bachelor party and come home with a hangover.

Friends of Mitchel Craddock, the bridegroom-to-be, each came home from his bash with a puppy.

Craddock took a puppy, too, and found a home for the litter’s mother with his grandparents.

It all started the morning of Craddock’s 5-day bachelor getaway, a four-wheeling trip to Tennessee arranged by the Best Man in Craddock’s Oct. 8 wedding.

The guys were cooking up bacon with the cabin door open, and a dirty, flea-bitten mutt appeared, politely parking herself in the doorway, but refusing their invitations to come inside.

The dog was obviously hungry and thirsty, wolfing down every offer of food and water but still remaining outside.

“She was very friendly but very skittish— I thought maybe she had been booted out of a house before,” Craddock said. She was so well behaved they felt sure she must belong to someone, but she remained at the 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,” Craddock said.

They named her Annie, after Little Orphan Annie.

It appeared that the dog had had puppies earlier, though her milk supply was dried up, but after the third day of food and water, Craddock said they noticed that she was producing milk. They also noticed that whenever a vehicle went down the road along the back of the cabin, near the woodline, she ran there, barking in alarm.

“We started connecting the dots,” Craddock said.

A little investigation and they discovered a deep, wide underground den, perhaps abandoned by another animal. In it were Annie’s seven puppies.

“We’re guessing they were maybe around 5 or 6 weeks old,” Craddock said, and although their mother was very malnourished, the pups were robust. “We were proud of her,” he said. “She gave everything she had to those puppies.”

“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,” he said.

The conclusion: “Thanks for coming to my bachelor party. Here’s a puppy,” Craddock said with a laugh.

Pics of puppies here.