A dog is truly a family’s best friend. From a faithful companion to your kids to a hot water bottle snuggled on the couch in the cold winter months, your canine friend will always be a part of your family. However, with great love comes great responsibility, and it’s got to be someone’s job to clear up the pet waste around your yard. Whether it’s following your dog around with a plastic bag in hand or going out after a few days with a pooper scooper, dog poop clean up is one garden chore that you can’t afford to ignore.
The Dangers Of Pet Waste
The obvious problem of leaving your dog’s waste out in your garden for too long is that it will start to smell badly pretty quickly (even more so in the hot Calgary sunshine!). However, there are other hidden dangers of uncollected pet waste in your yard:
- Harmful chemicals – no matter whether you choose to feed your dog fresh meat or kibble, the enzymes that break down their dinner get passed into their faeces. Any carnivorous animal produces waste that contains harmful chemicals both to humans and to the soil it falls on. It doesn’t take long for these chemicals to break down and leach into your garden, and this can destroy all the hard work you do to keep your lawn looking perfect.
- Rodents – as gross as it sounds, there are plenty of creatures out in your neighbourhood who consider your dog’s poop as a delicacy. Leaving it out in your garden acts like an open invitation to all rodents and pests nearby to come for dinner, and once they’ve come round once, they’ll be there every night expecting more. It will take many weeks or even months of keeping your garden entirely clear of dog poop to persuade them not to visit any more.
- Territory marking – finally, the awful smell in the air is only part of what your dog’s waste is emitting. There are also pheromones that are only sensed by other animals that clearly mark your garden as the territory of your dog. While this can be a positive when it comes to keeping some neighbourhood creatures away, it can cause real problems if you have visiting dogs come over. They will sense the dominance coming from your yard and either be so intimidated that they won’t go outside, or become aggressive and try to assert their own position with your dog.
How Often Should I Be Cleaning Up?
With all the dangers of leaving pet waste out in your yard for too long, it’s obvious that you need to stay on top of your dog poop clean up for the health of your family and your lawn. It then becomes a question of how often you should be out there with your pooper scooper. The answer depends on a variety of factors. In an ideal world, you’d be out there following your dog around, but there are a few reasons why this isn’t feasible.
Firstly, if your dog stays in the yard by themselves when you’re at work, then you can’t be there every time they go to the toilet. Secondly, if you have multiple dogs, it can be hard to work out who has pooped and where, and you don’t want to waste your free time watching your dogs constantly. Lastly, if your dog is prone to wet or loose poops, you can often end up smearing bits of it around on the ground as you pick it up. In these last cases, it can be worthwhile waiting a day for it to dry out so you can be sure that you’ve picked it all up.
In all of these scenarios, you really don’t want to go more than a day or two without getting all the dog poop from your yard. This might need to be more frequent depending on the number of dogs that you have and how much poop they generate each day.
Getting Professional Help
It’s clear to see that you need to keep on top of your dog poop clean up on a regular basis. However, if you’ve got a full time job and/or small children at home, it can be hard to find time or to remember this essential task. This is when getting professional help can save you time as well as garden heartache. When it comes to professional pet waste removal in Calgary, Scoop Cut N Shovel should be your first phone call. We have decades of property maintenance experience across the city and we have plenty of different pet waste removal options to fit any budget and family size.
Scoop’s Pet Waste Options
Scoop Cut N Shovel has a wide range of dog waste removal services for you to choose from. These can either be ordered as stand alone purchases just for your dog poop clean up, or they can be bundled with our other property maintenance packages to save you time and money. Our popular poop cleanup services include:
- A one-off clean up – this is an ideal purchase if you’ve spent a considerable time away from home while your dog has been at home with a house sitter or if you’re moving into a new home with an untended lawn. Our prices are reasonable for a one off clean up and the total amount will change depending on the extent of the clean up we need to do for you.
- Multi-dog packages – if you have, or care for, multiple dogs, our multi-dog packages are a must have. Our team of poop clean up experts will come out once or twice a week depending on which package you choose, and you save money by buying multiple months of service at the same time.
- Scoop-scription – our best value by far (apart from bundling with our year round property maintenance package!) is to subscribe to our dog waste removal services. This takes all the pressure off remembering to get out and clean, and allows you to spend your spare time on more productive (and less smelly) chores around your garden.