A 12-week-old puppy has Kansas City officials stumped after it survived three weeks locked inside of an impounded car.

Danny Rotert, communications director in the Kansas City Mayor’s Office, said a tow company worker had been moving throughout the lot on Monday, designating vehicles for auction when the dog jumped up on the dashboard. It's “a pretty miraculous story,” Rotert said.

The puppy, who animal shelter workers have named Kia, most likely survived the ordeal by eating discarded McDonald's fast food left in the impounded Chevy Suburban, the Kansas City Star reports.

Billie Deam, a veterinarian and owner of the Animal Clinic in Kansas City, North, agreed this was a “miraculous” tale of survival.

“Without an appreciable amount of water, it’s pretty miraculous for a puppy to survive three weeks in a car,” Deam said. “Physiologically it’s possible, depending on what she was eating to survive on. But it’s really stretching the outer limits of what’s possible.”

Rotert said tow lot workers were upset and no one intended to neglect the dog. The 1990 Chevy Suburban was impounded on April 8 after motorists complained that an abandoned vehicle on an eastbound ramp to I-70 from Van Brunt Boulevard was blocking traffic. Rotert said neither police nor the tow driver or workers at the impound lot noticed a dog in the locked car and said it is against the lot’s policy to open a locked vehicle.

He added that on May 1 the unidentified owner returned to the lot to check the car but didn’t have the keys and made no mention of a dog. Rotert speculated that the dog may have been hiding from its owner when it was towed. He said Kia is now at a foster shelter.

“She came in about 2:30 or 3 p.m.,” Tori Fugate, a spokeswoman for the Kansas City Pet Project, where Kia is recovering, said. “She was really skinny.”

Fugate said shelter workers expect Kia to recover. "It seems a little too crazy to be true, but it is. We will give her some proper medical care … She is very, very dehydrated and obviously very malnourished. We will get some food in her."

After Kia is better, the shelter plans to find a foster home so she can be trained and placed for adoption.

The discovery of Kia came weeks after a three-year-old Belgian Malnois named Napo was found dead in a Mississippi police officer’s patrol car after he reportedly locked the K-9 in overnight by accident. The animal’s handler, Steve Verret of the Perry County Police Department, was reassigned but hasn’t been sentenced to disciplinary actions, the New York Daily News reports.

Animal rights activists have called for Verret to be fired, the local Mississippi TV station WLOX13 reports.

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