Full Scottish Breakfast & Black Pudding

A few days before Christmas my cousin, her husband and Mum, plus two rather large German Shepherds were coming to stay on their way up to Durness were they were to spend the holidays.

Once they arrived we tried to get all the dogs together to see how it would go, we had a contingency plan just in case they didn't like each other.

The German shepherds were huge, I mean really huge, much bigger than I remembered and Henry and Molly sniffed around them while they stoated about the garden, all dogs were on their leads,just in case. Molly was fine, she wasn't bothered about playing or jumping around, she just said hello and went off and left them to it. Henry of course was a different case. He jumped about the shepherds, they tolerated him, just. Then the big male shepherd got fed up with him and we all realised that Henry wouldn't even make a dinner for him, and not even a small snack, he'd just be a mini dog treat as he seemed so skinny in comparison. We decided that the dogs would all end up having a massive fight and a visit to the vets was not what any of us wanted just before Christmas so we resorted to keeping one pair of dogs in another room and the others in the living room with us and swapping them about every half hour or so. Needless to say, the shepherds were incredibly well behaved, so settled and took everything in their stride, I was completely in awe of them and wished my dog training skills were up to that standard!

The next morning I got up early to make everyone a huge Scottish breakfast complete with black and fruit pudding which everyone enjoyed. All too soon it was time for our lovely visitors to get going on their long trip, so we helped them with their stuff and waved goodbye, ready for the next round of Christmas visitors, Other Halfs parents who were coming down the next day.

When I went back into the house I found various contents of the kitchen bin strewn accross the kitchen, hall and living room floors. Then I noticed one of the little plastic strips that they put around the fruit and black puddings. I immediately did a mental calculation of how many strips there should be and found that there were 8 missing! They were nowhere to be seen so the only place they could be was inside a dog, but which dog?

I didn't panic, after all I've had dogs for years and they eat all sorts of things without a problem but I decided I should call the vet just in case. The vet said to bring the dogs straight to the surgery as the plastic rings could get caught in the dogs gut and cause some major problems. So I had to leave all the beds unchanged, bundle the dogs into the car and run to the vets. Molly is often car sick so I tried to drive very badly to encourage her but of course this was one of those journeys where she behaved impeccably and wasn't sick at all!

Once at the vets the dogs were taken straight through to a special room with kennels in it and I had to hold the dogs while the vet administered masses of bicarbinate of soda and water to them. We then put the dogs in the kennels and waited. The vet said the result was usually fairly instant and that it woudln't be long before we found the plastic rings again.

However the dogs had other ideas. They looked extremely insulted at what had just happened to them and stood there looking very indignant indeed. We waited, and waited, the bicarb made the dogs blow up like a pair of odd balloons but still nothing happened.

After a long time the vet said the only thing we could do was try to hurry the digestion process along by trying liquid parafin which the dogs were duly dosed with. After speaking with the vet I decided to take the dogs home, armed with all the symptoms if anything should happen and also a small bottle of liquid parafin. I also promised to try and find the rings once they were expelled.

Thus began the mystery of the disappearing plastic rings. The dogs were fine, no adverse affects to either the bicarb or parafin, most dogs would have been laying with their legs in the air doing impressions of an exploding sewer works, but oh no, my dogs did nothing at all. I then had to spend the next few days (including Christmas day) picking through all expellations (the only polite word I can think of at this moment) to find the plastic rings and they never appeared. Never.

It seems that the plastic rings around black pudding and fruit pudding from Tescos must be dissolvable as several months later the dogs are still alive dispite never finding them....