A tiger born in one of Russia's smallest zoos has been adopted by an unusual foster parent after it was rejected by its mother. The cub is now being reared by a pet dog who accepted the cub after giving birth to her own pups.

Zookeepers in the Omsk Region became worried for the newborn tiger after its mother failed to display any maternal instincts.

When Mai was born the whole village visited him – they had waited twenty years for such a birth. But joy quickly gave way to concern as Mai's mother was refusing to feed him, according to zoo keeper Tatyana Guseletova.

“We guessed that she might not want to feed the cub,” she said. “Venera, the tigress, had artificial feeding herself, and that reduces the maternal drive. We tried to somehow evoke it and for that reason, did not take the cub away from her straight away. We observed how she treated the cub: she dragged him around, tried to hide and even abandoned him. She would have killed the cub,” Tatyana Guseletova from Bolsherechye zoo says.

And there was another twist to the tale. Mai's mother had a rival – the father of the cub was involved with another tigress and this was also affecting her maternal instincts.

So keepers at the zoo had to deprive Mai's mother of her parental rights to save the cub’s life – and start searching for a foster parent.

Residents of a neighbouring village took one of their street dogs, Zhucha, to the zoo with her new-born puppies. The plan worked – Zhuchka immediately accepted her new son.

But Zhuchka's milk was not the right kind for a tiger cub, as Tamara Pochekueva, the zoo’s deputy director, explained.

“All predators, not only tigers, have much richer milk,” she said. “About 5-6 times more nutritious than other animals, because out in the wild, tigers do not feed that often. Cubs could be left on their own for a week at such an age as Mai is now – because the parents need to hunt,”  explains zoo's deputy director Tamara Pochekueva.

So zoo staff give him goat-milk and cow milk cream shakes.

The vets are confident that Mai is developing well, but he will soon grow bigger than his foster mother, and at that point they will need to be separated.

Mai's keepers are grateful to Zuchka for raising Mai as her own, but they say sometimes it is noticeable that he has been raised by a dog: when he sees a cat, he snarls with all his might.