Gujarat National Park, India documented a lioness from the Asian lion band that fed and cared for a tiny tiger until he died in 45 days due to an actual hernia

• The lioness with one of her quarters alongside the little tiger adopted by Facebook

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The Asian Lions and Tigers bands in the Great Lim National Park in Gujarat, India, usually live in a separate group because these are predators competing for the same hunter segment. However, this natural reality did not stop a young lioness from adopting a small tiger puppy in December 2018, who lived and played with her two young cubs.

The case, which was investigated by Dr. Stutra Chakrabarty, of the University of Minnesota, who prepared the park for his postdoctoral dissertation - is extremely rare and the first to be documented in decades of adopting a puppy from the cat family by another species.

According to the report, published in the Ecosphere journal, researchers first spotted a lioness caring for the little tiger cub near the antelope she was hunting. So the lioness fed the meat not only her puppies but also the little tiger. At this point, the researchers thought it was a one-off case, but prolonged surveillance showed that the lioness had literally adopted the little tiger and it had been fed by it for a month and a half and also played with great pleasure with its two cubs that were twice its size.

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The growth of the unusual puppy was relatively easy to lionize because the Asian lions rarely live in a band and are more accustomed to living as individual individuals. After the litter, the two lion cubs live separately without the need to convince the other lions to accept the pup as one of their own.

Unfortunately, the little tiger was found dead after 45 days, but not due to injury from his brother or lioness, but due to a hernia that has apparently suffered from him since birth.

Modes of adoption between different animal species are known in nature, but are relatively rare. In 2004, there was a case of a cappuccino band that adopted a puppy from Rammost and raised it as part of it while undergoing intensive treatment. In another case, a dolphin was reportedly adopted by a pumpkin whale puppy. The dolphin band to which she belongs got the puppy as if he were a dolphin himself and it learned to leap out of the water like them.

In these three cases, the person who entered the band the foreign puppy was a breastfeeding mother and the researchers note that during breastfeeding, the maternal need may often outweigh the external variance of the adopted puppy.