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Last year we started feeding a sweet dog in the village – “Leela”. Like so many dogs, she lives chained to the barrel that is her shelter all year round. Her job is to ‘guard’ her chickens from the Cretan martins, though we suspect the martins might be smart enough to realise that being chained, she can’t get to them. Leela often goes off shooting with her owner, Dimitri, she’s fed every day, and we have seen her go into his house in the winter. Compared to many dogs here she doesn’t have too bad a life, and she’s certainly a happy thing. In June, we smugly congratulated ourselves on beefing her up so much, until we looked under her barrel and realised that she had been pregnant and had just given birth to eight large puppies. Hmm, what colour was dad...?!