The dog hiding out under a shed in rural Mississippi had good reason to seek cover.
Nestled beside her: 10 puppies.
The new mother seemed scared and nervous when rescuers arrived at her makeshift home.
But a generous foster family took all of them in. Every last puppy.
Now one of those pups is headed to the big game — the Puppy Bowl.
Coto, a German shepherd-Labrador retriever mix, will sport a blue bandana as part of Team Fluff in the annual Super Bowl tradition, a favorite pregame show for dog lovers and animal rescuers of all stripes.
Puppy Bowl XXI, which airs Sunday afternoon on Animal Planet and other channels (see tune-in information below), will feature 142 rescue dogs from 40 states in three hours of play. Teams Ruff and Fluff will vie for the Lombarky Trophy, their rosters including eight dogs from New Jersey.
Read on for more about the Jersey pups at Puppy Bowl 2025.
Shasta with her litter of 10 puppies in Mississippi. They include Coto, aka Dakota, who is playing on Team Fluff in the Puppy Bowl.Courtesy of JerseyGirls Animal Rescue
From the shed to the Super Bowl
Coto, the dog rescued in Mississippi, comes to the game via JerseyGirls Animal Rescue of South Plainfield.
The Jersey rescue organization, which Rosemary Petriello founded in 2012, has been participating in Puppy Bowl since 2015.
“Every year, we hear from people who are excited to see our puppies in the game,” she tells NJ Advance Media. “They start casting for the Puppy Bowl in July and then the filming is in October.”
Most of the time, the dogs shown in the game are already adopted by the time the show is filmed or by the time it airs.
“The reality is that puppies do go quickly,” Petriello says.
Coto is no exception — now named Dakota, he lives with a family in South River.
The dog and his siblings came to New Jersey in the care of the rescue when they were 4 weeks old.
Coto with his siblings when they were rescued, left, and at the Puppy Bowl, middle. At right, his mother, Shasta, after being rescued. Courtesy of Jersey Girls Animal Rescue
Coto’s mother Shasta, who delivered him and the nine other puppies under that shed, was taken in for treatment. She had heartworm and needed to have her front paw amputated because of an injury that did not heal properly.
Another dog from JerseyGirls Animal Rescue in the Puppy Bowl is Murphy, also on Team Fluff.
Both Coto/Dakota and Murphy, a poodle-golden retriever mix, were about 4 months old when they filmed the game in Glens Falls, New York. Their adopters accompanied them to the show.
Murphy was found in Alabama as a stray along with his sister. Today he lives with a family in Pennsylvania.
Sisters, reunited
Two Jersey pups headed to the Puppy Bowl are related.
Basset hound mixes Shadow and Lilly are sisters — and they’re playing for different teams.
Lilly, who has a copper-colored coat, is on Team Ruff, and Shadow, who has a darker coat, is on Team Fluff.
They come from Tri-State Basset Hound Rescue, another foster-based rescue in Deepwater, Pennsville that has been sending dogs to the Puppy Bowl for four years.
“It’s a nationally televised event on such an epic day of the year, with it being kind of the tee-up before Super Bowl,” says Julia Ellis, a board trustee with the group. “It’s provided us immense exposure to the public on a national level.”
Shadow, a basset hound mix, both at the Puppy Bowl and at her new home.Courtesy of Katy de Navas
While the dogs in the game are already adopted when the show airs, the widely viewed event does direct attention to the Jersey rescue.
“We definitely get more followers on our social media, we definitely get more clicks to our website and hopefully that results in continued support and donations to support our mission to rescue, rehabilitate and rehome basset hounds and basset hound mixes,” Ellis says. “We’ve gotten more volunteers because of it, we’ve gotten — most importantly — more adoptions and more approved applicants to adopt through our screening process.”
She says Lilly and Shadow came from a litter of seven puppies born in Arkansas this past May. Their mother, Sadie, is a purebred basset hound.
“She wandered into a random person’s backyard and had the puppies,” Ellis says.
Someone spotted the dogs and got in touch with the basset hound group. But during the rescue, some of the puppies were missing. Those dogs were found when rescuers returned the next day.
One of them was Lilly, which was reflected in the first name her foster gave her: Miracle.
Shadow with her dog family — the pack — in Northfield, Atlantic County. Courtesy of Katy de Navas
Shadow’s other name: Ember.
“They were in rough shape for those first few weeks,” Ellis says.
The puppies had to be bottle-fed because Sadie had an infection and couldn’t nurse. Today Sadie, Lilly and Shadow are all adopted.
Lilly lives with a couple in Highland Mills, New York and Shadow lives in Northfield with Katy de Navas and her family, including three other dogs.
De Navas, who works as a nurse, had filled out applications to adopt dogs earlier in the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the demand was so high, she never got an answer.
READ MORE: Pet adoption soars in N.J. as animal lovers have nothing but time (from 2020)
Then she saw Sadie’s litter of puppies on social media. They’d been born May 20, her son’s birthday.
With Shadow, “all the stars aligned,” she says. “They called me.”
These days, the basset hound mix hangs out with her pack of dogs — an Australian shepherd and two “Doodles of some sort,” De Navas says.
Shadow, now 8 months old, started out as a foster. De Navas wanted to see how the other dogs would respond.
Shadow on the big screen at the Puppy Bowl. “She scored the first touchdown of the day,” her owner says.Courtesy of Katy de Navas
When the puppy rolled over on her back and they sniffed her, it seemed they would be fast friends.
“They’re actually in my backyard right now, running around in the leftover snow,” De Navas says.
Shadow bears a distinct hallmark of her breed — a deep, sonorous bark.
“It does not match what she looks like,” De Navas says. “She’s so tiny and she just sounds so big and scary.”
In fact, the family often calls her Baby Dog. De Navas thinks her pup may have been the runt of the litter.
When she took Shadow to the Puppy Bowl, the dog reunited with her sister Lilly.
“They were so cute together,” De Navas says. “They definitely remembered each other after being apart for a couple months.”
And Shadow managed to snag an early “win” in the game.
“She scored the first touchdown of the day,” De Navas says.
After 30 minutes of intense cardio, she wanted to sleep the rest of it away.
Underdogs for the win
Another Jersey rescue dog at the Puppy Bowl has quite the comeback story.
Bo, a pug-Yorkshire terrier mix, was being given away with his brother, Luke, at a garage sale in Corpus Christi, Texas.
“They were both very sick,” says Erin Camporin, president of the Chatham-based rescue organization A Second Chance for Ziva.
When they were rescued, the dogs were anemic and weren’t eating.
“They bounced back within just a couple weeks and started gaining weight,” she says.
Bo, left, and Brie both come from A Second Chance For Ziva, a rescue group based in Chatham.Animal Planet/Discovery
Now Bo lives in New York, thanks to the rescue’s efforts. A Second Chance for Ziva, founded in 2017, works with a network of foster families in New Jersey and Connecticut and often takes in dogs from Texas, Oklahoma and Georgia.
Bo can be seen on Team Ruff at the Puppy Bowl squaring off against Team Fluff, which is home to another dog helped by the same Jersey rescue.
Brie, a Chihuahua-American pit bull terrier mix, was one of seven puppies born to Parmesan, a dog rescued by a foster from the group. Now both Brie and Parmesan have homes. The puppy lives in Connecticut.
Another Team Fluff player is Hewett, a disabled dog from MatchDog Rescue in Waterford Township, Camden County.
The Chihuahua-Australian cattle dog mix was born without a left eye.
During the filming of the Puppy Bowl, he made himself a main event.
Hewett, left, and Liberty are valuable members of Team Fluff and come from South Jersey’s MatchDog Rescue.Animal Planet/Discovery
“Hewett was so energetic,” says Krista Madden, a MatchDog volunteer who works on social media for the group and brought dogs to the Puppy Bowl. “He was keeping people laughing the whole time, the whole day. He had a blast playing with the other dogs on the field … He was rambunctious, for sure.”
Hewett, now 8 months old, was adopted after the taping of the show and currently lives in Philadelphia.
MatchDog’s rescues come from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. They are quarantined there for a month and get checked and treated by a vet before arriving at the homes of New Jersey fosters.
Another is Liberty, a pug-dachshund mix on Team Fluff who now also calls Philadelphia home. She was picked to be featured on the Puppy Bowl cheerleading team wearing a tutu.
“Everyone was obsessed with her,” Madden says. “She was just like a rag doll almost, like a Slinky. You could hold her and she just would fall asleep in your arms.”
How to watch / what channel / streaming the Puppy Bowl
Puppy Bowl 2025, aka Puppy Bowl XXI, airs on Animal Planet, Discovery, TBS and truTV Sunday, Feb. 9 at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT.
The show will also be streaming on Max and Discovery+ at the same time.
New Jersey rescue groups
For more information on the rescue organizations participating in Puppy Bowl, visit:
JerseyGirls Animal Rescue on Instagram and Facebook
Tri-State Basset Hound Rescue at tristatebassets.org, Facebook and Instagram
A Second Chance For Ziva at asecondchanceforziva.org, Instagram and Facebook
MatchDog Rescue at matchdogrescue.org, Instagram and Facebook
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Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup on Twitter/X, @amykup.bsky.social on Bluesky and @kupamy on Instagram and Threads.
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