[RobbW]

Thank you all for your helpful insight and advice! Much appreciated!

Here is what I’m doing now:

1). I’ve set up a sprinkler on an automatic timer to water the main part of the lawn where the dogs conduct their business. The timer is set for 7:15 am and goes for an hour every morning. I’m hoping this will help with diluting the urine and preventing the burn.

2). I have done a lime application on my entire lawn, front and back. The lawn showed multiple symptoms of an acidic pH. We have never limed our yard in the 13+ years we’ve lived here. So, it was long overdue. I had never known that was something you should do every now and then. Seriously, someone should give new homeowners some type of guidebook on general home and lawn care when they close on their house! This fall and in future years, I will over-seed my lawn with grass seed of a variety that is more tolerant to urine burn, such as tall fescue.

3). I have switched back to The Honest Kitchen Revel (chicken) food. For now, I am mixing their old BB Wilderness kibble half and half with the THK. I will keep mixing the two together until we have gone through what’s left of the BB kibble. I am mixing the combination with twice as much water as THK calls for. This is making their meals pretty sloppy wet, but my dogs eat it up heartily!

4). I am feeding the dogs according to their ideal weights, not their current weights.

5). I have NOT purchase any lawn burn supplements and will NOT. No need to mess with their chemistry!

6). My wife, kids, and I have started playing Pokemon Go and take our dogs out on the walks with us. The increased exercise should help!

I’m hoping all these changes will help with the lawn burn and also my dogs’ weight problems. However, I’m afraid that the switch to the THK food may hinder my beagle’s weight loss in the near future. They like this food much better. So much so that my beagle, after she finishes her bowl, pushes my golden out of the way and eats all the rest of his food. I did not realize this was happening until I caught her in the act the other morning. No wonder she has gotten so big! I have to figure out a way to prevent this from happening.

[RobbW]

I should also mention that my dogs are overweight. So, along with trying to alleviate the lawn burning problem, I also want to try to get their weights down. My Golden is about 85lbs (would like to get him down to 70-75lbs), and my Beagle is about 40lbs (would like to get her down 25-30lbs).

Our dogs used to not be so heavy when we were feeding them THK. But like I said, it because an inconvenience constantly having to mix up the food, especially for our house/pet-sitter when we’d go on vacation. That’s why I did a lot of research and settled on what I considered to be a high-quality dry kibble. But, obviously, my dogs ballooning up over the past year is probably indicative of the dry kibble not being all that great for them.

I don’t know. Maybe I should just go back to exclusively THK again. If I had my druthers (and unlimited funds), I’d do frozen raw food nuggets. But those are prohibitively expensive with our two dogs. We used to feed our first (and only dog at the time) Steve’s Real Food and Northwest Naturals, and she did awesome on those. She was lean and had no health problems on the frozen raw food. But it was only one 40lb dog. Our current two dogs (at a combined ideal weight of nearly 100lbs) would put us in the poor house trying to feed them frozen raw!

[RobbW]

Thanks! No, I was not planning on trying any of those additives such as the Grass Saver tablets or anything like that. I saw those at the pet store and decided to do some research on them before buying them. Glad I didn’t just impulse buy them. They sound pretty bad for our furry friends.

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