Malnourished Toddler Discovered Nursing From A Mama Dog

FriendsDogs are really great people, and nothing illustrates that quite like a news story that came out of Chile this week when police discovered that a female dog was nursing a malnourished 2-year-old human child that nobody else was taking proper care of.

According to the Associated Press, the little boy was found on Thursday being breastfed by a mother dog like Romulus and Remus. The dog is a very big, very fuzzy female dog named Reina (that’s not her pictured above, but she looks similar), and she reportedly belongs to the boy’s neighbor, who is an auto mechanic. When nobody else was feeding or taking care of that little boy, Reina apparently decided to just do it herself, because dogs are good people.

Reina sounds like a very good dog, but aside from that this story is disgusting. When a witness called police and reported seeing the boy nursing from Reina in a yard filled with old cars and auto parts, the boy was taken to a hospital, where doctors said he was very malnourished. The boy’s mother reportedly came to the hospital to pick him up and police say she was very drunk when she showed up.

The mother did not take the little boy home with her, because Child Services wanted to investigate further. The little boy is currently being taken care of by the state as an investigation proceeds into how exactly a little boy reportedly in the care of a human parent winds up being mothered by a neighborhood dog instead. The mother was not arrested, however, because police said there were no signs of physical harm to the child, even though most people would probably consider malnourishment to be a type of physical harm. And letting a toddler get so hungry that he wanders off to be breastfed by neighborhood pets should definitely qualify as neglect.

I hope someone adopts both the baby and the dog, but that the baby does not have to nurse from the dog ever again. Reina is a very good dog, but that is definitely not her job. Taking care of human babies is a human’s job, and this little boy’s mother does not sound like she was doing hers if a neighborhood dog spotted her toddler running around hungry and decided to mother him.

(Photo: iStockPhoto/Getty Images/yulkapopkova)

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