Family Put An AirTag On Their Dog Who Kept Running Away Only To Find Out She'd Been Right Under Them All Along
They found her in the most unlikely place — and hiding a big surprise too.
For pet lovers, there's perhaps no bigger anxiety than the possibility of a lost dog or cat, especially if your animal is the type to run off on adventures the minute they see an opportunity to bolt out the door.
One family on TikTok has a dog like this. Their husky Lili kept wandering off so much they went to extraordinary measures to keep track of her—only to find her days later in the most unlikely of places, and harboring a giant surprise to boot.
A family on TikTok placed an AirTag on their lost dog, only to find her directly underneath their house.
TikToker Ashley Tabor, known as @ashleytabor0 on the app, posted that her dog Lili had disappeared for four days. So when she returned, they put an Apple AirTag on her—a device that allows users to track the whereabouts of any object via GPS.
It turned out Lili had been hiding super close by, but getting to her was no easy task.
The family discovered their dog had hidden underneath the floorboards of their house to give birth to a litter of puppies.
As Tabor showed in her video, getting to Lili once they figured out where she which took quite an effort—including the use of a circular saw.
Once they got through the floorboards, there was Lili, curled up in an underground hole beneath their house. And nestled up against her was a whole litter of newborn puppies.
"You got some babies," Tabor cooed at Lili as she tried to coax her out with dog treats and bones. After lots of tempting her, the gambit eventually worked—Lili climbed out of the hole in the floor for her treat. Getting her babies out of the hole, however, proved a far more challenging task.
The family had to send their small child into the hole to retrieve Lili's tiny puppies.
"An adult couldn't fit into her den, so we did what any good parent would do," Tabor quipped, "we sent our middle child in to do the job." Their young son was able to retrieve Lili's entire litter, making Tabor and her husband "the proud grandparents of 6 puppies," as she put it.
And as several TikTok commenters noticed, even Tabor's very serious husband could help but melt once he got the puppies in his arms.
"Shhhhhh he’s getting his skin to skin!!" one commenter joked at the sight of Tabor's husband's cuddling one of the pups like a newborn baby.
Dogs often hide when they're about to give birth to puppies, and it's frequently one of the first signs a dog is in labor.
As a veterinarian discusses in the video below, canines will sometimes shun attention when they're getting ready to give birth to a litter, a process called whelping.
As she prepares to whelp, a dog will do what is called nesting, an instinct to prepare a safe den-like space for her puppies away from any predators. She may scratch at her dog bed to clean it or pick it up and move it somewhere else in the house, for instance. But in some cases, like Lili's, a dog will also go off and hide someplace to whelp, which makes them feel safer as to give birth out in the open in the wild would be dangerous for both the dog and her puppies.
Veterinarians caution dog owners not to interfere with any of these instincts and to not try to choose where their dog whelps—doing so can cause anxiety in the dog that could interfere with the whelping process.
Turns out both Lili's and the Tabors' instincts to just let her be under the house were the correct ones.
Tabor posted a TikTok update showing that Lili's puppies are healthy and thriving.
On their two-week birthday, Tabor posted a video giving some glimpses into Lili's new family—three male puppies and three female puppies.
Tabor reported that two weeks in, Lili's pups have begun opening their eyes and moving around the house a bit.
A few people on TikTok criticized Tabor for not having Lili spayed, but Tabor decided to turn that controversy into action. "Please consider putting your words into action by donating to a no-kill shelter with a skilled nursing program," she wrote in her video update.
As for Lili herself, Tabor reported that she is under a veterinarian's care and is recovering nicely after her under-the-house misadventure. A very happy ending to the story of a very good girl!
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.