Hi,
and thanks for your question which shines a light in an interesting direction for my further research. My problem lies in the fact that I've only been trialling Houdini for a couple of weeks, so I'm still mired in the fog of unfamiliarity, so my task, outlined above, which probably has several simple solutions, has been beyond my grasp.
We've solved the issue by importing a second character with a whole body UV set and using those to generate our fur, while our main render mesh has two UV tiles.
Thanks again
H