Dog ownership has been a lifeline during lockdown: Yorkshire Post Letters

A man and his dog in Scarborough during lockdown. Picture: Richard Ponter

Before Christine Hyde (‘Complacency puts us all in danger of a second pandemic’, The Yorkshire Post, June 8) talks about youths with cans and well-heeled, expensively dressed dog walkers in the same sentence, she might like to consider that there are very many individuals, such as myself, who have gone through lockdown as vulnerable adults totally on our own except for our dogs.

Many of us are neither well-heeled nor expensively dressed and our dogs are our only companions in the house and on walks.

We all try to avoid people and so, in the unlikely event that she meets two of us together, I’m sure she could avoid us as she would with anyone else if social distancing.

A dog plays in the sea in Scarborough. Picture: Danny Lawson/PA

Editor’s note: first and foremost - and rarely have I written down these words with more sincerity - I hope this finds you well.

Almost certainly you are here because you value the quality and the integrity of the journalism produced by The Yorkshire Post’s journalists - almost all of which live alongside you in Yorkshire, spending the wages they earn with Yorkshire businesses - who last year took this title to the industry watchdog’s Most Trusted Newspaper in Britain accolade.

And that is why I must make an urgent request of you: as advertising revenue declines, your support becomes evermore crucial to the maintenance of the journalistic standards expected of The Yorkshire Post. If you can, safely, please buy a paper or take up a subscription. We want to continue to make you proud of Yorkshire’s National Newspaper but we are going to need your help.

Postal subscription copies can be ordered by calling 0330 4030066 or by emailing [email protected]. Vouchers, to be exchanged at retail sales outlets - our newsagents need you, too - can be subscribed to by contacting subscriptions on 0330 1235950 or by visiting www.localsubsplus.co.uk where you should select The Yorkshire Post from the list of titles available.

If you want to help right now, download our tablet app from the App / Play Stores. Every contribution you make helps to provide this county with the best regional journalism in the country.

Sincerely. Thank you.

James Mitchinson

Editor