Family dog preys on miracle baby

Family dog preys on miracle baby

Dogs are said to be man’s best friends. Many people believe that dogs are better guards than human beings. This is because while human security guards can sell out and betray their masters by conniving with thieves or armed robbers to rob the homes under their watch, dogs are always faithful to their owners. Such people, therefore, prefer to keep dogs to guard their homes.

However, just as there are two sides to every coin, these best friends of man can also become his worst nightmares. There have been instances of dogs killing people or landing them in hospitals after biting them and in some cases infecting them with rabies. Rabies is a serious disease which causes people and animals to go mad and die, and it is particularly common in dogs. This is the reason dog owners are often called upon by government and some well meaning organizations to vaccinate their dogs against rabies.

A well-to-do family based in Port Harcourt recently had the most horrific experience of their lives when their dog robbed them of their most valuable possession in broad daylight. The head of the family is a director with a very rich federal government establishment, while the wife is an international businesswoman. They had been married for 10 years without a child as all efforts to have one proved abortive. The man loves his wife dearly, so he resisted the temptation of marrying another wife.

The couple had a foreign dog that they bought for N100, 000 to guard their palatial home. The giant dog later discovered to be of fox origin looked scary to say the least. It was well loved and well fed by the couple, and it was allowed free movement both inside the house and in the compound. The animal sent shivers down the spines of visitors to the home of this couple but it had been well trained to obey his masters’ orders. So, the couple kept it in chains when guests were around.

Eventually, the woman of the house became pregnant and the couple celebrated the fact that at last, they would hear the cry of a baby in that house. The man pampered his wife and they both looked forward to the arrival of the baby. Three days before the baby arrived, however, the woman began to feel funny and her husband quickly rushed her to the hospital. On getting there, she was told that it was not time for delivery and advised to remain in the hospital for observation.

She was there for three days before she delivered a bouncing baby boy, and the man had to be shuttling between his office and the hospital before retiring home every night. The housemaid on her part was preparing meals for madam which she and the driver took to her thrice daily. Everyone at the home front was stressed up by anxiety over madam’s condition, and so, no one remembered to feed the dog for those three days.

When madam returned home, the housemaid had gone to the market to buy soup ingredients to prepare something for the new mum, while the man of the house went straight to the toilet to ease himself. So, the woman laid the baby on the couch and went inside the room to prepare the cot. Her plan was to bring the cot to the parlour so she would lay the baby in it. That turned out to be a big mistake.

Somehow, during the period that no one was in the sitting room with the baby, the dog emerged from wherever and on sighting the baby, perhaps mistaking him for an intruder, coupled with the fact that it had been starved for days, pounced on him, ripping his tummy open. The cry of the baby alerted his parents but by the time they got there, tragedy had already struck. Their dog had dispossessed them of the baby that took them 10 years to have. The woman screamed and fainted immediately she beheld the spectacle, and it took another three days before she could utter a word after she was revived in the hospital. The man on his own part rushed into the room to fetch his gun and emptied a whole magazine on the cruel dog. He couldn’t stop shooting even after the dog had died, an action that later attracted neighbours who thought there was a robbery attack on the family.

When his friends, relatives and colleagues heard what happened to him, those of them who owned dogs panicked and immediately disposed of them as they could not imagine that a dog could visit a household member with such brutality.