I like to think that they just happened to have too many puppies around the lab, but they probably have ways to find out about us. They did have to find and drag us here in the first place, after all.

[But it does make him wonder what he would have been given had there been no Houndours available. A part of him doesn't want to know.]

Might be too commonplace and normal for the writers' tastes. The point of sci-fi is seeing a completely different world, right?