The 7.8 magnitude earthquake that shook Turkiye and Syria has been accumulating a death toll of 46,000 people, and the numbers are still growing. Amid those harrowing facts, miraculous rescues of survivors have been reported worldwide and those are not limited to just people.

Recently, after 9 days of being trapped under the rubble, a black-dotted white cat was pulled from the ruins of a collapsed apartment block in Nurdagi, in the Gaziantep province of eastern Turkey. The cat was recused by a 33-year-old firefighter named Ali Cakas.

Ever since the rescue, the cat refused to leave Ali’s side, even after it was given food and water. It continued to follow him as he hunted for other survivors.

Ali and his colleagues from the Mardin Fire Department named the cat Enkaz, a Turkish word for rubble or wreck and treated it as their mascot.

A video that captured Enkaz being on Ali’s shoulders, posted by a Ukranian public figure, Anton Gerashchenko, also went viral on social media. The video he posted on Twitter garnered 33 million views and 660K Likes at the time of writing.

In the video, Enkaz was seen standing on Ali’s right shoulder and eventually sitting down, not moving an inch away from his rescuer’s side. Ali was also seen smiling after the cat sniffed his face showing its gratefulness to him.

He eventually adopted Enkaz

After realizing that Enkaz’s owner might not have made it from the earthquake as no one was there to claim him, Ali who used to ride for Turkiye’s national mountain bike team, adopted the cat and brought him home in Mardin.

Enkaz now eats with Ali and his family at home and even sleeps in the same bed as him.