Hi folks,

(Disclaimer: I'm new in the group - feel free to point me to a FAQ if
appropro).

I've got two beagles, just over 3 years, and I'm trying to strike a balance
between then and the back yard. I have a large lot which instead of grass
has a lot of the area with ground cover (like little pieces of bark) over
weed cloth. "The boys" normally have run of the yard (it's fenced in) and I
literally mean run - something like the beagleopolis 500 when they're
chasing each other. However, because I really didn't regularate (or even
know how to train it out of them - my bad), they would "find" bits of the
weed cloth and rip/tear it up. Now the back yard looks more like a war zone
(ok, not quite, but it's bits of cloth all over).

I'm having the old ground cover and cloth taken up and will put down new
stuff. My initial thought was to try putting some bitter apple on the cloth
to make it less appetizing to them, but I feel that that might have to be
reapplied from time to time, and it would mean scraping away the ground
cover, applying, and recovering.

I'm wondering if there's any ideas or suggestions to
1) train the beagle not to tear up the cloth (or use some kind of smell
aversion?)
2) figure out how deep to make the ground cover (assuming that'll make any
difference)
3) any other this I can do vis-a-vis the ground cover or the cloth to make
it last longer

FWIW, there are areas of the yard with just dirt, so they do have diggable
(sic?) areas, as well as the two corner sandbox areas I've taught them to
use as their bathrooms. I obviously don't want to use any chemicals
dangerous to the dogs, nor do I want to limit them to their dog-run when
outside and unsupervised (although that might be the necessary choice -
thank goodness the run is very large and has its own facilities - dog house,
a couple trees, spare bathroom - and is separately fenced in from the rest
of the back yard).

Anyway, I'm rambling. I'm outside my experience area here, so any
suggestions, ideas, or recommendations would be muchly appreciated.

If you prefer to contact me off-list, send email to beagle DASH dad AT
rgoldman DOT org (replacing DASH, AT, and DOT with the corresponding
symbols). Simply replying will not work (Anti-spam at work, yes?)

Thanx, Ric

P.S. If there are better groups to address this to, please let me know.

"Some guy" wrote in message
k.net...
Hi folks,

(Disclaimer: I'm new in the group - feel free to point me to a FAQ if
appropro).

I've got two beagles, just over 3 years, and I'm trying to strike a
balance between then and the back yard. I have a large lot which instead
of grass has a lot of the area with ground cover (like little pieces of
bark) over weed cloth. "The boys" normally have run of the yard (it's
fenced in) and I literally mean run - something like the beagleopolis 500
when they're chasing each other. However, because I really didn't
regularate (or even know how to train it out of them - my bad), they would
"find" bits of the weed cloth and rip/tear it up. Now the back yard looks
more like a war zone (ok, not quite, but it's bits of cloth all over).

I'm having the old ground cover and cloth taken up and will put down new
stuff. My initial thought was to try putting some bitter apple on the
cloth to make it less appetizing to them, but I feel that that might have
to be reapplied from time to time, and it would mean scraping away the
ground cover, applying, and recovering.

I'm wondering if there's any ideas or suggestions to
1) train the beagle not to tear up the cloth (or use some kind of smell
aversion?)
2) figure out how deep to make the ground cover (assuming that'll make any
difference)
3) any other this I can do vis-a-vis the ground cover or the cloth to make
it last longer

FWIW, there are areas of the yard with just dirt, so they do have diggable
(sic?) areas, as well as the two corner sandbox areas I've taught them to
use as their bathrooms. I obviously don't want to use any chemicals
dangerous to the dogs, nor do I want to limit them to their dog-run when
outside and unsupervised (although that might be the necessary choice -
thank goodness the run is very large and has its own facilities - dog
house, a couple trees, spare bathroom - and is separately fenced in from
the rest of the back yard).

Anyway, I'm rambling. I'm outside my experience area here, so any
suggestions, ideas, or recommendations would be muchly appreciated.

If you prefer to contact me off-list, send email to beagle DASH dad AT
rgoldman DOT org (replacing DASH, AT, and DOT with the corresponding
symbols). Simply replying will not work (Anti-spam at work, yes?)

Thanx, Ric

P.S. If there are better groups to address this to, please let me know.

I don't have time to closely supervise my dogs outside. They have dog doors
and go in and out at will.

If I had this problem, I'd get some hardware cloth. Plenty of it. I'd put
down the weed cloth and cover it with the hardware cloth, staple it down
somehow maybe with pieces of wire coat hanger. IOW, the weed cloth would
become very difficult to get to, heh. Then put the bark mulch over that.
They might scatter the mulch around, but they wouldn't be able to dig
through that hardware cloth. Metal chickenwire might work, too.

flick 100785