Dog saves abandoned baby
A nursing dog foraging for food retrieved an abandoned baby girl in a forest in Kenya and carried the infant to its litter of puppies, witnesses said today.
The stray dog carried the infant across a busy road and a barbed wire fence in a poor neighbourhood near the Ngong Forests in the capital, Nairobi, Stephen Thoya told the independent Daily Nation newspaper.
The dog apparently found the baby in a plastic bag in which the infant had been abandoned, said Aggrey Mwalimu, owner of the compound where the animal is now living. It was unclear how the baby survived in the bag without suffocating.
Doctors said the baby had been abandoned about two days before the dog discovered her.
Medical workers later found maggots in the infant’s umbilical cord, a product of days of neglect,
Hannah Gakuo, the spokeswoman of the Kenyatta National Hospital, where the girl was taken for treatment, said today. No one has yet claimed the baby, she said.
But the 7lbs 2oz infant “is doing well, responding to treatment, she is stable … she is on antibiotics,” Gakuo told The Associated Press. Workers at the hospital are calling the child Angel, she said.
Unwanted infants are often abandoned in Kenya – sometimes they are even dumped into pit latrines.
Poverty and mothers’ failed relationships with fathers are often blamed for the problem, and Kenya’s weak law enforcement and social security systems means that most people who abandon babies are never caught.
“Abandoned babies are normally taken to the Kenyatta National Hospital because it is a public hospital,” Gakuo said. “People are now donating nappies and baby clothes for this one.”
