HAVING just read a letter headlined Please get a life, dog-haters from Patricia Hayes, I have to say that I was astonished that you saw fit to publish it, being as it is so riddled with error, falsehoods and misunderstandings.

Ms Hayes has used fictional statistics, "99 per cent of owners do clean up" and made personal remarks "nothing else better to do," “get a life” to attack your correspondent, Mr Parry, while simultaneously entirely missing the point of his letter, twisting it into an alleged "hatred" of dogs.

Additionally, the claim that "human beings transmit many more diseases than dogs" would only have any relevance to the issue at hand if humans ran around parks doing their business as and when they saw fit, which in my experience, they do not.

As a dog owner and walker myself, I am often disgusted to find myself sliding round as if on an ice rink, but how this translates to a hatred for dogs remains a mystery to me.

My hatred and, I feel, that of Mr Parry and many of your readers, is reserved for the antisocial owners and the mess that they leave behind, not the innocent doggies.

No-one, Ms Hayes, is begrudging you your canine company.

Derek Brown, Caldy