Gautreaux's to the Rescue

no those are not our dogs, but they are the neighbor's.  one saturday morning, seth took out our dog smokey and heard wimpering coming from the shed.  on further investigation we discovered 4 puppies, but no mother.  in a rush to get to a baseball game, we decided to leave the puppies there for the morning and take action after the game.  after hunter's game we came back to find the mother adding more puppies to the underneath of our shed, so we followed her to find out where was she taking them from.  it was our next door neighbor's dog and she was pulling them out from underneath her shed.  wasn't sure why until we looked under the shed.  there was a turtle the size of a small dinner plate and it was on top of one of the puppies.  my boys grabbed a shovel and managed to take the turtle out, put it in the back ditch and saved the puppy, but one puppy had already perished.  the turtle had been eating it.  so hunter rushed under and grabbed the puppy ever so carefully to place him in a box and proceeded to carry out a burial with seth.  it was so wonderful to see how much they cared for animals.  we cared for the mother and other puppies in our garage til our neighbor returned home, even trying to help the puppies find milk pumping it into their mouths while we settled the mother down.  the neighbor then came for her dog (that she thought was a male) and left with her and the puppies.  we found out days later that all the puppies had died and that the mother was not taking care of them.  she was really just a young pup herself, i'm not sure she even knew what to do or how to protect them from the rain and sun outside according to the neighbor.  the kids were all devastated.  they took such pride in rescuing the pups only to be disappointed that their efforts didn't save them.  i tried explaining to them that death is a part of life, but alas it didn't ease the pain.  all i could do was express how proud i was of them for taking a chance, making an effort, and doing something - b/c most people don't even do that.