Dog ‘eats’ baby girl

DARAGA, Albay — Instead of celebrating the New Year, Francisca Peñarubia, 26, wept beside her six-month-old baby girl wrapped in a bloodstained yellow blanket inside their dimly lit hut in Barangay Bagtang here.

The distraught mother of two could not believe that the life of her baby, Ivy, could end so tragically after a neighbor’s dog gnawed at the infant’s face Monday night. The baby died five hours later at the hospital.

Francisca, along with her four-year-old daughter, was in Legazpi City to hear Mass when the "killer dog," named Blackie, came.

Her husband, Fernando, left for a while to get food at his father-in-law’s house just a few meters away. Left in the hut was Francisca’s mother, Sioneda, 77, but she was fast asleep after selling balut the whole day.

"I saw the dog biting the face of Ivy inside the mosquito net," said Fernando, a tricycle driver, in the dialect. He grappled with the dog and later hacked it dead.

Asked whether she noticed any signs that Blackie was in a "killing mood," the dog’s owner, Vicky Glario, said in the dialect: "It could be the firecrackers last night or it could be rabies. I don’t know."

In a mound covered with banana leaves nearby lie the remains of Blackie which neighborhood teens buried with a yellow plastic rope around its neck.