IN A tale that could have been lifted from the pages of a children’s story book, a five-year-old dog foraging for food has been credited with saving the life of a baby who had been left alone in a Nairobi forest for two days.

Baby Angel, as the two-week-old girl has been called by nurses in a hospital in the Kenyan capital, is suspected of having been abandoned by her mother in Lenana Forest last Wednesday.

The baby’s story is impossible to prove but it has raised intense media interest in Kenya. One thing that is certain is that the hospital has been inundated by members of the public donating clothes and nappies for what some have called the miracle baby.

Local residents told the Daily Nation newspaper how they saw the dog carrying a plastic bag across the busy Ngong road and slipping under a barbed wire fence into its residential compound on Friday afternoon.

Mary Adhiambo, the dog’s owner, told the newspaper that her two children, Collins, 8, and Ken, 6, ran into the house on Friday saying that they could hear a baby crying in the compound.

“I followed them outside and we started looking around the compound and a nearby plot. I saw my dog, which I have had for five years, lying protectively with her puppy besides the soiled baby lying in a torn black cloth,” Mrs Adhiambo said.

“I held the baby in my arms and carried it into the house.”

Mrs Adhiambo gave the baby some milk and cleaned it with hot water before taking it to a police station. The child was then taken to the Kenyatta National Hospital where doctors found maggots in the 7¼lb (3.3kg) baby’s umbilical cord.

Eugene Were, a registrar, said that her navel had to be cleaned with surgical spirit to avoid further infection.

He said that Angel, who was also dehydrated upon admission, could have been abandoned in the forest for no longer than two days.

“Had she stayed longer than that she would have died,” he told the newspaper.

Dr Were said that she was likely to make a full recovery. “Apart from a high fever she is clinically stable. She is also feeding well.”

Hannah Gakuo, a spokeswoman for the hospital, said that nobody had come forward to claim the baby.

“She is in a separate room, like an isolation ward, with a lady who is also nursing a baby admitted in hospital for treatment,” Ms Gakuo said. “The lady is looking after her as if she is her own child.”

Ms Gakuo added that Angel “is very quiet. She just feeds and sleeps.”

Abandoned babies are not uncommon in Kenya, where abortion is illegal and poverty is widespread. Most offenders are never caught.

Officials could not give figures on the numbers of abandoned children in Kenya but hospital staff said that on average two children are taken to Nairobi’s main public hospital every month.

The dog’s moment of glory is unlikely to last long. One of several who live on the Adhiambos’ compound, she does not even have a name, and usually has to find her own food to feed her litter of puppies.

• A seven-year-old Indian boy allegedly survived the Boxing Day tsunami when his dog “nipped and nudged” him up a hill to safety
  
• In 1996 a gorilla at Brookfield Zoo, Chicago, picked up and cuddled a three-year-old who had fallen into its enclosure, then returned the child to zookeepers
  
• In 1986 five-year-old Levan Merritt was cradled by a gorilla at Jersey Zoo after falling 20ft into the enclosure
  
• In 1998 police trying to rescue a “feral” boy near Moscow were held off by the dogs who had become his friends
  
• Chimpanzees were said to have looked after a two-year-old disabled boy for a year after he was abandoned by his nomadic tribe in Nigeria in 1996

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