Meet The Sausage Dogs

Two runaway miniature schnauzers were saved by the passion for bangers.

- Emily Rothery

LIZ and GRAHAM HAMPSON were devastated when their son John called to tell them that their much-loved dogs had gone missing. John, who is in the Royal Navy, had just returned on leave to the family home in Cockermouth and had taken the pair of miniature schnauzers, father and son Charlie and Theo, for a walk in the Buttermere fells. On the summit of Red Pike at 2,476 feet, a thick fog rolled in and, uncharacteristically, the dogs didn’t return when John called them.

‘Our dogs love to be on the tops and have walked most of the main Lake District fells. They are used to being off the lead when there is no livestock and always come back to us,’ says Liz, who works for Cumbria Police.

‘We were devastated when we got the phone call especially as we realised that looking for two small grey dogs on the fells would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.’

As we talk two spirited schnauzers are scampering round the lawn so I know that this story has a happy ending, but I can still sense Liz’s distress as she recalls how the frantic search went on for nearly four days. ‘During that time our lives were turned upside-down. We couldn’t eat or sleep,’ she says.