There’s a lot of different emotional strains going in this Times story…
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.
There’s definitely anger, at the idea of someone abandoning a baby in a plastic bag in the woods. (I am quite sensitive to baby stuff now, I know.) There are both kinds of disgust: with people (for the same reason as anger) and visceral (the bit about the maggots in the umbilical cord). There is happiness that the baby appears to be OK, and that she survived two days without any care. There is a kind of Jungle Book awe at the dog finding her and taking her to care for. And there is a niggling bit of suspicion (“The baby’s story is impossible to prove but it has raised intense media interest in Kenya.”)
Oh, and a little more combined happiness and disgust–happiness that people are apparently donating clothes, diapers, etc, but disgust that it needs to be a “miracle baby” story for this to happen; the article makes it sound like baby abandonment is depressingly regular in the area, and it shouldn’t take a shaggy dog story to bring out people’s philanthropic sides.
(An aside: I read this first on CNN, but when I went back tonight to get quotes to include in this post, the text of the story had changed significantly, causing me to go look for a more credible–and stable–source. While it’s not a big deal in this particular case, I am suddenly really feeling Matt Stover‘s rant–in Blade of Tyshalle— about only trusting printed words, because electronic ones can be changed without anyone knowing.)
