A 39-year-old woman was charged with animal cruelty after she tried to air-mail the dog to Atlanta from downtown Minneapolis, authorities said.

The postal worker was stunned when the package moved by itself and fell to the floor. Then came the sounds of heavy panting.

Within minutes, she and co-workers had unwrapped a tightly sealed box and rescued a 4-month-old puppy that a Minneapolis woman tried to mail to Georgia.

“It’s just crazy,” said Minneapolis Police Sgt. Angela Dodge. The air holes the woman punched in the box were covered up with mailing tape, and the priority mail trip would have taken at least two days, she said. “It was supposed to be a birthday gift for a family member. It would have been kind of traumatizing to get a dead puppy,” Dodge said. “If you don’t identify it so that it can be handled properly, it goes into the cargo hold of an airplane. It gets 40 below in those cargo planes that get up 40,000 feet. And there was no food or water. Puppies can’t go for long periods without food or water.”

The dog would have been dead on delivery, agreed police spokesman Sgt. William Palmer. “I’ve been doing this for 17 years. This is a new one on me.”

The woman, Stacey Champion, declined to tell police why she decided to mail the puppy, Dodge said.

On the outside of the package Champion wrote “This is for your 11th birthday. It’s what you wanted,” he said. She also told the clerk that if sounds came from the package, not to worry, it just contained a toy robot, Ojoyeyi added.

The whole article is pretty surprising itself, but this part really caught my attention for some reason:

The dog is now at the city’s animal control facility. If Champion declines or loses her appeal, Guess would go up for adoption. So far, Champion hasn’t notified authorities that she wants the dog back, Dodge said.

She did, however, return to the post office to demand a refund for the $22 she paid to mail the puppy. She also wanted a small amount of money she had attached to a makeshift dog collar returned to her.