Post by Blue Thunderbird on May 10, 2005 16:27:23 GMT -5
Stray Dog In Kenya Retrieves Abandoned Baby,
Takes Her To Litter Of Puppies
09/05/2005
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) - A stray dog saved the life of a newborn baby after finding the abandoned infant in a forest and apparently carrying it across a busy road and through some barbed wire to her litter of puppies, witnesses said.
Felix Omondi, 11, with an unnamed dog in a compound on the outskirts of Nairobi Monday. The nursing dog foraging for food retrieved an abandoned baby girl in a forest and carried the infant to her litter of puppies, witnesses said. (AP Photo/Sayyid Azim)
The stray dog found the infant, clad in tattered clothing, in a poor neighbourhood near the Ngong Forests in the capital of Nairobi, Stephen Thoya told the Daily Nation newspaper.
The dog apparently found the baby Friday in a plastic bag in which the infant had been abandoned, said Aggrey Mwalimu, owner of the shed where the animal was guarding its puppies. The seven-pound, four-ounce infant was taken to hospital for treatment on Saturday.
"She is doing well, responding to treatment," Hanna Gakuo, a spokeswoman for Kenyatta National Hospital, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from the hospital where health workers named the infant Angel.
"She is stable. She is on antibiotics," said Gakuo.
Kenya's news media often report the abandonment of newborns by mothers. Poverty and the inability to care for the child are seen as the root cause of the problem. 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 diapers and baby clothes for this one."
