A dog foraging for food for her newborn puppies rescued an abandoned baby girl from a forest in Kenya and brought it back to her litter, it was reported on Monday.
They said that dog apparently found the two-week-old infant in a forest south of the capital Nairobi on Friday. It then carried the baby, wrapped in a dirty black cloth, across a busy road and through a barbed-wire fence and placed it close to the puppies.
“I heard the sound of a baby crying (when) I looked closely, I saw a dog carrying a baby.. as it crossed the road,” witness Stephen Thoya told the Daily Nation newspaper.
The dog lay next to the baby until it was spotted by human rescuers, its owner Mary Adhiambo said.
Adhiambo said she washed the baby, whose umbilical chord was covered with maggots, and rushed it to hospital.
At the hospital, where the 3.3 kg baby was christened ‘Angel’, doctors confirmed that the infant had been out in the open for two days.
“An infant of such a tender age, having spent two nights in the cold, is likely to develop respiratory infections and we have put her on a.. treatment to prevent any bacterial or fungal infections,” Dr Jonathan Micheni told the paper.
{{/usCountry}}“An infant of such a tender age, having spent two nights in the cold, is likely to develop respiratory infections and we have put her on a.. treatment to prevent any bacterial or fungal infections,” Dr Jonathan Micheni told the paper.
{{/usCountry}}Incidents in which newborn babies are abandoned are common in the east African nation, where more than 56 percent of the 33.3 million inhabitants live on less than a dollar a day.
Authorities here have reported a rise in abortion cases.