Nairobi - A nursing dog foraging for food found an abandoned baby girl in a forest in Kenya and carried the infant to its litter of puppies, witnesses said on Monday.
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, Stephen Thoya told the independent Daily Nation newspaper.
The dog apparently found the baby on Friday in the 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, said Hannah Gakuo, the spokesperson of the Kenyatta National Hospital, where the girl was taken for treatment.
No one has yet claimed the baby, she said.
But the 3,3kg infant "is doing well, responding to treatment, she is stable... she is on antibiotics", Gakuo said. Workers at the hospital are calling the child Angel, she said.
Unwanted infants are often abandoned in Kenya. Poverty and mothers' failed relationships with fathers are often blamed for the problem, and Kenya's weak law enforcement and social security systems mean that most women 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." - Sapa-AP