REUNITED!
Sheepdog Blake back with his owner … but with Bella the lamb still missing, police are called in over ‘kidnapping’
BEAMING with joy as her dog runs into her arms, this was the moment ‘ecstatic’ owner Natalie Haywood was reunited with sheepdog Blake after he had been missing for almost three weeks.
But the reunion was bitter-sweet as Bella the lamb – Blake’s unlikely best friend with whom he disappeared, prompting a search that gripped the nation – has still not been found.
And the mystery has deepened as Blake appears to have been fed and well looked after, leading to speculation he may have been kidnapped.
Last night Miss Haywood, 22, contacted police asking them to investigate. There was also a reported sighting of a lamb and dog being picked up by a driver close to her home in the week after they went missing, she said.
The mother of two remains hopeful Bella will be found, and believes she may have been picked up and put in a field with other sheep.
Blake was returned on Saturday afternoon by farmer Becky Stamp, who said she found him wandering in the road two miles from Miss Haywood’s home in Perlethorpe, Nottinghamshire.
Miss Haywood said: ‘ He seemed pretty excited to see us and we were ecstatic. I’ve got my baby back. But I’m concerned about what might have happened to him.
‘If he’d been living in the forest, he would have been skinny and be covered in ticks but he looks as if he’s been fed and around people. Also, it doesn’t answer what happened to Bella.’
One-year-old Blake and Bella, who would now be eight weeks old, became inseparable after Miss Haywood adopted the lamb. They went missing from her garden on May 8. Dozens of volun- teers and pet detectives with sniffer dogs joined the search. A heat-detecting drone was also used and cameras were put up in the woods to try to spot them.
Mrs Stamp, 40, who lives at Witham St Hughs near Lincoln, was passing through the area with her four children to go for an ice cream when she spotted Blake near the village of Walesby.
‘If I hadn’t been going slowly, I’d have hit him,’ she said. Mrs Stamp was not aware of Bella and Blake’s story, but her daugh- ters looked up missing dogs on the internet on their phones and realised they had found Blake.
Miss Haywood was collecting her one-year-old son from a relative’s house when she received a phone call from Mrs Stamp and rushed home to meet her.
The farmer wasn’t interested in the £1,000 reward offered by TV host Phillip Schofield ‘as we aren’t money-grabbers’ and drove off after handing the dog over. Mrs Stamp, who keeps sheep herself, said there was no sign of a lamb when she found Blake. She also believes Bella may have been picked up by a farmer and put with other sheep, or may have climbed into a field by herself through a gap in a fence.
Miss Haywood, who also has a daughter, four, and partner Jordan Knight, 22, are appealing to farmers who notice they have an extra lamb to get in touch.
In the meantime, there is a new addition to the family – Nala, a six week-old Rottweiler-German shepherd cross.