【Lina Romay】

Let's start with something positive: Seven extremely cute puppies have Lina Romaybeen rescued from the wilds of Canada, and are right now on the road (literally) to a better life.

The circumstances of how the puppies came to be stranded on an uninhabited island in the Canadian province of Manitoba remains a mystery, however. Most of the obvious possibilities here lead to some troubling conclusions.

The saga of the puppy rescue began on Monday when a volunteer for Winnipeg's Norway House Animal Rescue called in to report their existence. The roughly four-month-old pups had been discovered by a local boater, Junior Cook, near Cross Lake, Manitoba, about 300 miles north of Winnipeg.

"He actually heard them the night before. He and his friend were out and it was getting dark already, and they heard some noises on the island," NHAR director Debra Vanderkhove told the CBC.

The two couldn't see anything other than shadows, but they returned the next day to investigate. Instead of wolves (their initial suspicion), they found seven puppies. The men left food for the lot of them and called the Winnipeg shelter.

In the days since the puppies were first discovered, Vanderkhove made the trip up to Manitoba, picked up the lot of them -- "They will be the Gilligan's Islandcrew — four boys, three girls," she said -- and, as of Saturday, is driving them back to the shelter.

All throughout, NHAR kept the public updated with Facebook posts featuring photos and videos of the rescued pups.

There are so many more on the shelter's official Facebook page.

It's wonderful to know that these tykes are safe and sound, and headed off to be cared for before they're placed in homes. But in a Facebook message exchange with Mashable, Vanderkhove wants everyone to remember that the pups shouldn't have been on that island in the first place.

"Today the focus is on the puppies and getting them to the shelter. We're still driving. And tomorrow is another day for the fight on investigating this cruelty."