IN a happy ending which could have come straight from a film script, new mum Lassie and her five tiny puppies came home in the nick of time.

The wandering Jack Russell's owners, Melanie and Brendan Wade, and their three little girls Chelsie, eight, Abbey, five and Katelynn, 11 months, had given up hope of seeing her again when she went missing two weeks ago.

They were packing up their home in Binchester, near Bishop Auckland, County Durham, for a move south to Wantage in Oxfordshire, on Saturday, and assumed that Lassie had found a hiding place to give birth.

Because of foot-and-mouth, the family could not search farm land or footpaths for Lassie, which they bought a month before Chelsie was born.

Fortunately, Lassie had been taken in by vet Paul Wilson at his Bishop Auckland surgery, hours after she gave birth. She had been found by a dog-owner who was unable to keep her.

And just as the practice appealed to Northern Echo readers to give the dogs homes, Mrs Wade's aunt, Janet Allan, saw Lassie enjoying a spot of exercise in the surgery's back yard.

Now, not only do the family have Lassie back, they also have plenty of prospective owners for the pups, thanks to the deluge of calls to the surgery in response to our story.

Mrs Wade said: "The pups are lovely. My husband is going to bring them back here in six weeks so that they can go to their new families."

Mr Wilson's practice administrator, Rachel Booth, said: "It was lovely to see her reunited with her family. They were in floods of tears when they picked her up. It was wonderful."