Tips to Remove Pet Waste During Winter

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Being a pet owner comes with a lot of responsibilities that balance out the joy that our furry friends bring to our lives. Caring for our animals is a year round occupation, between keeping them fed and watered, up to date with their vaccines and health check ups, and the eternal battle of cleaning up their waste. 

The Importance of Cleaning Up Pet Waste

Most Calgary dog owners train their pets to go outside to relieve themselves as the sheer size of their poop means that an indoor litter tray or toilet just isn’t feasible. However, it can feel like a gross and unwanted chore to clean up after your pet, especially in winter when it’s cold and often dark when you let your dog out after work. Here’s 3 reasons why you need to stay on top of the pet waste in your yard:

  • Unwanted guests – as disgusting as it may seem, pet waste is actually a food source to a wide variety of rodents and other unwanted critters who live in Calgary. When you choose to leave your dog’s waste out in your yard for a few days, you’re effectively sending out the invite to the neighbourhood’s hottest new restaurant. You’ll quickly find a big selection of creatures scuttling around your yard in the hope of free food, and once they’ve marked your yard as a food source, it can be incredibly difficult to get rid of them. 
  • Poisonous chemicals – while it’s true that the freezing temperatures in winter slow the decomposition process for pet waste, there are still the occasional warm days. Because dogs have a carnivorous diet (even if you only feed them dry kibble!), their stomach bacteria creates waste that contains chemicals that are highly poisonous to your garden. By leaving the dog waste all winter, you’ll end up leaching these toxins deep into your soil, making it almost impossible to create healthy living conditions for your plants and grass. 
  • The smell – finally, there’s no easy way to say it, but poop smells pretty bad. Even when the temperatures drop and the pet waste freezes up, you’ll still be left with an overwhelming smell of dog poop as you move around your property. The smell is highly addictive to many rodents, as noted above, and it will also smell disgusting to any friends and family who come to visit.

Getting Rid Of Pet Waste In Winter

From a logical viewpoint, it’s easy to see the importance of keeping your yard free of pet waste during the winter. However it can be hard to motivate yourself to get out there and collect it when the temperatures are below freezing and the wind and snow are whipping around your property. To keep on top of your pet waste during winter, you need to build these habits:

  • Create a designated area – one of the easiest ways to keep on top of your pet waste problem during the winter is to create a designated area for your dog to go to do its business. This area should ideally be close to your house so you’re not trekking across your garden in the dark and cold, and it should also be somewhere that you can shovel clear of snow easily. Keeping the area clear of snow will help you quickly see and pick up the poop, as well as removing the need to put on your snow boots each time you take your dog out. 
  • Clean up as you go – it may sound obvious, but if you pick up after your dog’s bathroom visit every single time, you’ll spend less time overall than if you wait a few days to go pick it up. This is because you’ll know exactly where your dog has been on each visit, and you can use your pooper scooper to get right on it. Even if your designated area is fenced in, there are a whole host of small creatures who will climb through and over any fence to get to a warm meal during the winter months. 
  • Dispose of waste carefully – finally, you need to make sure that you have a thought out plan of what to do with the dog poop once you’ve collected it. Chucking it into a different area of your garden just changes the location of the problem, while putting it in a dedicated bin runs the risk of having a larger rodent knocking everything over. You’ll want to find a way of disposing of it frequently, so that might be a bin that’s in an inside location or adding it your general household waste; either way, you want to get the dog poop off your property as soon as possible. 

Call In The Experts

There comes a point for every Calgary pet owner when there is a balance to be had between being a responsible pet owner and spending hours freezing outside waiting for your dog to poop, and paying someone to come and take care of the problem for you. This is when you need to call the dog poop experts at Scoop Cut N Shovel to take care of your pet waste problems for you. We have a wide range of subscription packages to take you and your furry friends all the way through winter and beyond. Our pet waste experts will come to your house on a frequent basis, pick up all the dog poop and make sure it’s carefully disposed of, leaving you free for warm snuggles inside with your dog. 

If you’re looking to save even more time and effort, you can bundle the pet waste removal service with any of Scoop Cut N Shovel’s services. A popular combination is with our snow and ice removal services to keep you warm and safe all winter long. For even better value, you can sign up for our year round property maintenance deal, which gives you access to everything you need to keep your yard looking great in every season. 

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