Dogs are the sweetest animals around (if not the smartest, though that’s up for debate). What’s more, their loving ways go beyond the relationship between a pup and his or her owner, as Life With Dogs TV recently reported that several years ago, one dog raised a lion cub like her own baby before the cub grew up—and needed to be in a bigger space than his doggy mama.
Story goes that back in 2014, a male lion cub was born at a zoo in Sri Lanka, but sadly, the cub’s mother rejected him. Zookeepers were rightfully concerned, as they wanted to ensure the lion cub was raised with love and grew to be strong, traditionally hard for cubs without parents. Then, the zookeepers had an idea to group the lion cub with a bunch of newborn puppies to be raised in a loving, familial environment.
It only took the dog—a golden lab—a few hours to fall in love with the lion cub, too. “After five, six hours, the dog changed, and she treated the lion cub as her own pup,” he said. “She licked him and she loves the lion cub more than her pups.”
She did so for three weeks, and the cub was welcomed into the fold by the puppies, too. They all played together like a natural litter and the little lion was a welcome playmate. Check out the video of the dogs, shared by BBC News, in which sweet pup nurses the baby lion along with her own brood of babies.
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