By Lalinda De La Fuente

So, Mother’s Day was yesterday and my vote for mother of the year goes to a real dog.

Lily, a Labrador mix, at a humane society in Burlington, Iowa, may have been a dog-gone good mother to six already adopted puppies, but it’s her devotion to a litter of kittens that makes her a mother to remember.

When the little kittens showed up at the shelter without a mother Teresa Kurth, who works for the shelter, told CBS news that they didn’t know what to do. It was Kurth though that helped come up with a solution.

There have been stories of dogs nursing cats and even cats nursing dogs. This was the suggestion made by Kurth to help these orphan kittens. The shelter took a chance on the suggestion and voila, the kittens now have a new mother, even if canine and not feline. In Kurth’s eyes “Lily is one of a kind”, as she told CBS news.

Really, any animal that tends to another species babies is one-of-a-kind. Lily has now joined the group of animals whose maternal instinct is so strong that they will tend to babies not of their own kind.

CBS news cites a baby horse that was raised by a goat and a lioness that would chill with an antelope. Even stranger is the case where a leopard killed a baboon and adopted its orphan baby.

With cases like this, mothers next year are really going to have to step it up.