17 Puppies Were Found Behind A California Walmart (One Already Dead)
The call came in on a Wednesday night, July 8, from a stranger standing in a grassy creek bed behind the Walmart in Livermore, California.
On the other end was Breann, a Tri-Valley local who regularly helps catch stray and lost dogs.
She’s the kind of number that gets passed around. A dog running loose near a road, a skinny stray circling a gas station — somebody knows somebody, and pretty soon Breann’s phone buzzes.
The Tri-Valley has plenty of room for a dog to get lost in. Livermore, Pleasanton, Dublin — ranch land and box stores stitched together by freeway, out past the Oakland hills.
So a call about a found dog wasn’t unusual for her.
This call was.
The person on the phone hadn’t found a dog, Breann later told NBC Bay Area. They’d found puppies. A whole group of them, down in the grass just past the store’s parking lot.
Little black-and-white puppies, only weeks old, with no mother and no owner anywhere in sight.
And this was nighttime, in a lot with cars still moving through it.
Breann grabbed a friend and drove over to help round them up. She’s caught plenty of strays over the years. Puppies, at least, can’t outrun you for long.
But there’s a number that changes what kind of night it’s going to be.
That grass was holding seventeen of them.
[Some of the rescued pups after intake. East Bay SPCA released photos of the group to Bay Area newsrooms on July 9. — Credit: NBC Bay Area / East Bay SPCA]
Nine or ten weeks old. That’s the shelter’s best guess at the puppies’ age — old enough to wander, way too young to be on their own.
Border collie mixes, they’d say later. Black and white, all of them.
Breann and her friend started catching.
A nine-week-old puppy fits in two hands. It also has exactly zero interest in staying there.
And almost right away, Breann could see these puppies hadn’t just wandered off from a warm bed somewhere.
“They had big, wormy bellies, and it really broke my heart because you could tell they were skinny and they were just bloated for the most part,” she told NBC Bay Area.
Skinny and swollen at the same time. That’s what a heavy worm load does to a young dog — the belly balloons while the body underneath goes hungry.
These pups had been fending for themselves. Nobody knows for how long.
So the two of them worked the grass in the dark, scooping up one small dog after another and carrying them back to the cars.
Anyone who’s tried to gather loose puppies knows the drill. Catch one, and two more squirm out of reach.
“It’s definitely a lot of puppies all at once, it kind of felt like it was never gonna end,” Breann said.
The count kept climbing. Past five, past ten, and still the grass kept moving.
“When we were putting one by one into the truck, I was like, ‘And there’s more!'” she said.
And there’s more. Four words that could caption the entire night.
In her telling to the station, you can hear the moment tip from emergency toward something almost funny. Puppy after puppy after puppy, and the pile in the truck getting louder by the minute.
It took two cars to hold everybody.
By the end, not one puppy was left behind in that grass. Sixteen of them, safe behind car doors.
Sixteen.
The caller had found seventeen.
Here’s the part of this story that hurts.
Before Breann ever arrived, before the counting and the loading, one of the puppies was struck by a car.
The puppy didn’t survive.
The person who found the group saw it happen, according to the East Bay SPCA.
Help was on the way. It didn’t come fast enough for that one.
Credit: East Bay SPCA via KTVU
The shelter didn’t share more than that.
Parking lots are one of the most dangerous places a stray litter can end up. Cars, carts, headlights — and puppies with no fear of any of it.
One pup out of seventeen, gone before its rescue could even start.
The other sixteen were still out there in the dark, close to the same traffic.
And every single one of them made it into a car that night.
That’s the math of July 8 behind the Livermore Walmart. Seventeen found. Sixteen saved.
And the woman loading them into her truck had seen this coming.
Credit: East Bay SPCA via KTVU
Breann didn’t give the TV cameras her last name.
She gave them something better: a plain answer about why this keeps happening.
Catching stray and lost dogs around the Tri-Valley is something she does all the time. That kind of volunteering is unglamorous work — late calls, dark fields, dogs that don’t want to be caught.
It also gives her a better read than most on what’s going on out here.
She told NBC Bay Area she wasn’t surprised to find a whole group of pups abandoned and alone. She’s watched the number of abandoned animals around the Tri-Valley climb as the cost of spaying and neutering rises.
Read that again.
A woman who regularly rescues abandoned dogs stood in a field of sixteen more, and her honest take was that she’d seen it coming.
Spay and neuter surgery has gotten expensive. Litters happen anyway. And when they do, some people have no idea what to do next.
The people at East Bay SPCA say the same thing, in almost the same words.
“People are really lacking the resources they need to take care of accidental or unwanted litters, often times they may panic, they may not know we’re here to take in those animals,” Jes Cytron, the organization’s vice president of operations, told NBC Bay Area.
They may not know we’re here.
Sixteen puppies loose in a parking lot is what that sentence looks like in real life.
The East Bay SPCA is where Livermore’s lost and hurt animals are supposed to end up.
The organization holds the city’s stray animal contract — a three-year partnership with the Livermore Police Department that just wrapped up its first year.
In that one year, 731 animals from Livermore came through its doors. More than 500 of them were strays.
That’s roughly two animals a day, every day, from one mid-sized city. And most shelter intakes arrive one or two at a time.
So the staff there knows what a busy night looks like. This was something else.
“It’s no small feat,” Cytron said of taking in sixteen puppies at once.
The logistics alone tell you why. One campus can’t simply absorb sixteen underage dogs at closing time, so the group got divided.
Six puppies were taken in at the SPCA’s Dublin campus, a short drive from Livermore.
Credit: East Bay SPCA via KTVU
The rescuers then took the other ten to the organization’s Oakland campus themselves — about 30 miles of freeway with a car full of puppies.
By then, both adoption centers had closed for the day.
The staff came anyway.
Teams at both campuses ran an emergency after-hours intake that same night, with medical checks and behavioral evaluations for every single pup.
Sixteen exams, spread across two cities, for sixteen puppies who’d started the evening loose behind a Walmart.
Everything Breann had seen in that grass, the wormy bellies and the skinny frames, was now a medical chart waiting to be filled in.
Then the results started coming back.
All sixteen were in good overall health.
Sixteen for sixteen.
Skinny, wormy, way too young to be out there alone — and still, underneath it all, fundamentally okay.
The worms will be treated. The hunger is already being handled.
In the photos the shelter shared with reporters, the pups are a heap of black-and-white fluff, ears flopped, piled on each other like nothing bad ever happened.
Then the staff pieced together a detail that made the whole thing stranger.
These sixteen probably aren’t all brothers and sisters.
Shelter spokesperson Victoria Ivankic told Patch that one litter of seventeen is technically possible — but it’s far more likely the puppies came from two different litters, with multiple mothers and fathers between them.
Two litters. Which means at least two mother dogs, somewhere, whose babies all ended up in the same patch of grass on the same night.
How? Nobody knows.
The SPCA says it isn’t even clear whether the puppies were dumped at the Walmart or left somewhere else and wandered over on their own.
As of that Friday, Livermore police hadn’t responded to questions about whether anyone was looking into the abandonment.
But when Ivankic talks about finding whoever left them, punishment isn’t the point.
“The main reason we would want to know who may have left the puppies would be to share resources to get mom and dad fixed, so that this doesn’t happen again,” she told CBS News Bay Area.
Credit: East Bay SPCA via KTVU
Get mom and dad fixed, so it doesn’t happen again.
No anger in it. Just an open door, and a hope that the next seventeen never exist at all.
Meanwhile, the sixteen have been doing their part, which mostly consists of being puppies.
They’ve adjusted well to shelter life so far, Cytron told NBC Bay Area.
Border collies are herding dogs, bred to work. Even at nine weeks, the wiring shows — the stare, the crouch, the busy little brain that wants a job.
Now multiply that by six in Dublin. Then by ten in Oakland.
Between these dogs and their new homes stands one last checklist.
Before adoption, every puppy must be spayed or neutered, vaccinated, dewormed, and microchipped.
The deworming is the big one — the fix for those swollen bellies that broke Breann’s heart back in the grass.
The shelter’s behavior team is also working with some of the pups on socialization, the everyday people-skills a young dog needs before heading home. A puppy that grows up around calm hands and normal households learns the world is safe. These sixteen are getting a crash course.
None of it is fast, and none of it is free.
This is the part of every rescue that happens off camera: the surgeries, the vaccines, the staff hours. It’s also the part that donations actually pay for.
And the need keeps growing. Intake at the shelter’s campuses nearly doubled between 2024 and 2025, as rising costs squeezed pet owners across the East Bay.
Sixteen puppies in one night is exactly the kind of thing that math predicts.
Still, on Facebook, the organization’s message about the rescue was a thank-you.
“Thank you to the Good Samaritan and our team for stepping up and working together to help these puppies!” the East Bay SPCA wrote.
Which leaves the obvious question. When can these puppies go home?
Soon. Very soon.
The SPCA expects some of the sixteen to be ready for adoption within a week or two of their July 8 rescue.
As of this writing, that window is open. The first of them could hit the adoption floor any day.
The shelter’s advice is simple: watch the East Bay SPCA website, because that’s where the puppies will appear the moment they’re cleared.
Six will go home through Dublin. Ten through Oakland.
Somewhere out there, sixteen couches have no idea what’s coming.
And one week ago, every one of these dogs was loose in the dark behind a big-box store — the same lot where one of their group never made it out.
That’s the distance a single phone call covered.
A stranger who stopped. A woman who answered. Two cars, two campuses, and a shelter staff that stayed late on a Wednesday night.
Cytron put it best in the organization’s statement:
“This situation serves as a perfect example of why we exist, and why we need the support of our community to exist.”
Sixteen border collie puppies are about to start looking for homes through East Bay SPCA’s Dublin and Oakland adoption centers — some as soon as this week.
Maybe one of them is yours. If you’ve been thinking about adding a dog to your life, signs don’t come much clearer than this.
And if you can’t adopt? That’s most of us. But somewhere out there are sixteen families who have no idea their puppy just got rescued from a parking lot. The only way they ever find out is if somebody puts this story in front of them.
That somebody can be you. It takes ten seconds. Share it.
💛 Take One Of The Walmart 16 Home
🐾 IN EAST BAY SPCA’S CARE — ADOPTIONS OPENING ANY DAY
Status confirmed July 13, 2026 via East Bay SPCA statements reported by KTVU — some pups expected ready “within the next week or two” of the July 8 rescue. Not yet listed as of publication; check the shelter’s site for the moment they go live.
The Walmart 16 · about 9–10 weeks old · border collie mixes (black and white) · 📍 Dublin & Oakland, CA
| 🏠 Meet them at | East Bay SPCA Dublin — 4651 Gleason Dr, Dublin, CA (6 pups) · East Bay SPCA Oakland — 8323 Baldwin St, Oakland, CA (10 pups) |
| 📞 Call | Dublin: (925) 479-9670 · Oakland: (510) 569-0702 |
| 📝 Watch the listings | eastbayspca.org/adopt/adopt-a-dog — updated as soon as the pups are available |
| 💰 Adoption fee | Set by East Bay SPCA — see current fees and process. Adoptions include spay/neuter, vaccines, microchip, flea/parasite prevention, plus a dog-training discount and starter supplies |
Can’t adopt right now? You can still change their story: 💚 Donate to East Bay SPCA · 📣 Share this story · 🐾 Foster or meet the shelter’s other dogs
NBC Bay Area first reported the rescue. Follow updates on East Bay SPCA’s Facebook.
Sources: East Bay SPCA (Facebook post and public statements) · NBC Bay Area, Alyssa Goard, July 9, 2026 (Breann and Cytron interviews) · KTVU · CBS News Bay Area / KION (Ivankic quote, timeline) · Patch Livermore (Ivankic litter details, contract figures) · Livermore Vine / Embarcadero Media (intake details) · KRON4 (health findings) · Bay City News via Local News Matters, May 28, 2026 (intake-increase background).
Story reported from public posts and coverage; quotes attributed to their original sources.
Meta description (148 chars): Someone found 17 puppies behind a Livermore Walmart. A stranger’s call — and a woman named Breann — saved 16. Here’s how to take one home.
