Michigan men adopt stray dog, puppies at bachelor party

Oct. 26, 2016: This photo shows, from left, Jake Rowe holding Knox, Joe Gruber holding Bear, Alex Manchester holding Rosie, Doug Craddock with Annie, Mitchel Craddock holding Brimmie, Brent Witters holding Finn and Dexter Jennings holding Gunner pose for a photo in Vicksburg, Mich. (Bryan Bennett/Kalamazoo Gazette-MLive Media Group via AP)

A group of men from Michigan have returned from a bachelor party in Tennessee with an unexpected surprise -- a stray dog and her litter of puppies in tow.

Groom-to-be Mitchel Craddock and his friends were on a five-day ATV-riding trip at a cabin in the woods when a stray dog approached their front door, MLive reported. The dog, they named Annie, wolfed down food and water the men gave her.

"We were cooking bacon with the door open. The next thing you know, there's this dog sitting right at the front door. She wouldn't come inside, but she sat right there," Craddock said.

The dog would linger around the cabin even when the men weren’t around.

"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 told MLive.

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Eventually the men noticed that Annie was producing milk, Craddock said. They found her seven puppies in a den down the road from the cabin.

The puppies appeared to be 5- to 6-weeks old and were very healthy, despite their mother’s malnourished look.

"We were proud of her," Craddock said. "She gave everything she had to those puppies."

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Craddock, who already owned a chocolate Labrador retriever, said he didn't intend to keep any of the puppies for his new household. However, his bride-to-be insisted they keep one.

"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 told MLive.

Each of the men took one of the puppies, whom they named Brimmie, Rosie, Daisy, Knox, Gunner, Bear and Finn. Craddock's grandparents took the mother as well as a puppy.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.