When police officer Nick McHugh reached under the seat of a vehicle filled with stolen goods, the last thing he expected to find was a puppy.

He and fellow officer Marisha Allen had just ended a pursuit in Christchurch in August, 2013. The three occupants ran off.

Detective Constable Allen said McHugh put his hand under the seat to feel for any other items and got a fright when he touched what he thought was a kitten.

GEORGE HEARD/FAIRFAX NZ Marisha Allen and Nick Johnston adopted Chase after Allen found her in an abandoned car following a pursuit.

"He sort of reached out under the front seat and something's moved so he yelled out . . . I love cats, so I thought I'd go have a look and get her out."

Instead, she pulled out a "tiny, fat and scared" puppy estimated to have been about five weeks old.

"She was shaking, she was scared out of her wits . . . It was too early to be taken away from her mum."

NZ POLICE Chase as a puppy, when she was abandoned after a police pursuit.

The pup was left at the pound for a week for her owners to come forward. One of the suspects was caught but denied any involvement while the others were never found, Allen said.

"Because she was quite rotund, we thought maybe she'd been stolen in a burglary like the rest of the property . . . No one ever came forward."

Allen and her husband Nick Johnston, also a police officer, put their names down to adopt the dog, eventually settling with the name Chase after the circumstances in which she was found.

GEORGE HEARD/FAIRFAX NZ Labrador cross Chase could have had a very different life if police officers Marisha Allen and Nick Johnston hadn't adopted her.

"Because she's a she, and a lot of people were mistaking her for a boy, Chase didn't seem like a very proper girls name . . . we tried to find a lot of names that matched the pursuit, but nothing [else] worked," Allen said.

Johnston said McHugh, a friend and someone he still regularly worked with, had been named as Chase's "godfather".

She attended puppy school from a young age and had been taught how to shake and speak, among other tricks, and had turned out "pretty cruisy," Johnston said.

"When she was a puppy she was quite aggressive. Even when she was so little she was quite aggressive, but it didn't take long for us to get it out of her, to train it out of her," he said.

The couple were confident they had given Chase a better life than the many distressed, aggressive or mistreated dogs they came across on the job, which could have been her reality.

"She probably would have been chained up in the back of some backyard and not treated very well," Johnston said.

"I don't think she would've had a very good life at all."