Foster mom Stevoni Doyle knows dogs pretty well. After 10 years of opening her home to dogs of various ages and states, she’s seen plenty of puppies and mother dogs, but none quite like Grayce, a pit bull mom she fostered, who gave birth to a whopping litter of 11 puppies. What she did with them after the birth was quite uncommon.
An adorable video taken by Doyle’s husband, Levi, shows an incredible thing that happened right after the birth. Instead of nursing the pups herself, Grayce brought each one of the tiny bundles to her human mom, sitting on the floor, placing them on her chest as one by one, before lying down to snuggle with the whole happy family between her legs.
After the video was published online, people all over the internet were touched by the incredible scene. It garnered over 35 million views to date on Facebook alone.
Three weeks after arriving, Grayce was finally in a safe environment to give birth. When she did, it was a big litter: 1 boy and 10 girls, in all. The labor lasted a long time, from Sunday at 9:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. Monday morning.
Though Grayce was clearly exhausted by the end and had done a great job giving birth, there was one more thing she felt she had to do: for some strange reason, she decided to introduce the new members of the family to the foster mom who had generously taken her in.
Doyle was a bit alarmed at first but soon felt completely overwhelmed by the gesture. “I wanted to give her space,” the experienced foster mom said. “And every time a puppy would cry, she would pick it up and bring it to me, until all 11 of them were in my arms.”
With brand-new puppies squeaking and crawling over her, she is heard saying in the video: “What am I supposed to do with these guys? I don’t know why you’re doing this. What do you need? Do you need help from me? Do you just want to love me?”
“I was honored that she choose me to trust with her pups and herself,” she told The Dodo. Most mother dogs’ maternal instinct is to keep others away from their babies, she added. But this case was different.
Afterward, Grayce joined the squeaking pile of puppies and her human mom. “She laid on me and wanted me to love her too,” Doyle said. “She would crawl on my lap and nurse her puppies if I would let her.”
Of course, there was a small downside to the very sweet gesture. “I’m going to have poop all over me,” Doyle shared. However inconvenient this might be, seeing this incredible phenomenon was worth it. “I’ve never seen a dog do anything like this,” she added.
