Musya, or Muska the cat, became a sensation at the Sadgorod Zoo in southeastern Russia. On the zoo’s Instagram page, she is seen nursing a little hoglets. Due to her strong maternal instinct, she cared for them as her own. Amazingly, Musya didn’t mind that these babies were covered in little spiky quills.

One day, someone brought the zoo a litter of eight tiny hoglets. Unfortunately, their mother had likely been killed in a lawnmower accident, but the babies survived. However, they were tiny and still blind, requiring their mother’s milk.

The baby hedgehogs refused to be fed unnaturally, ie from a bottle or syringe. And since they were newborns, they were blind which meant they couldn’t fend for themselves. They were beginning to starve.

That was until Musya the cat stepped up and became a wet nurse to all the babies. She still had milk left in her from taking care of some other foster kittens, and luckily, the baby spike balls took to her immediately.

But Musya didn’t stop there with her motherly duties, she also takes care of them at night. The ‘adoption’ seems to have gone smoothly with both parties happy, although Musya has been letting out a hiss when the babies are a bit too prickly.

Soon, the hedgehogs were able to feed on their own. As you can imagine, visitors to the zoo wanted to see them, and they enjoyed a natural enclose with plantings and a hedgehog lair, caves made just for them.