Exposure to environmental toxins can make your pets sick in the same way toxins impact human health. Here’s some simple tips to help protect your precious pets from unnecessary toxic exposure when walking, rolling, and eating (and pooping) in your lawn and garden.
Avoid Garden Chemicals
Go organic, and use only organic pest controls and fertilizers.
Once you identify the troublemakers on your lawn, you can choose a plethora of alternative solutions. You can tackle weeds in many safe and natural ways.
Avoid Mulch With Added Chemicals
Use only organic mulches in your garden, such as straw, leaves, and shredded bark. If you use mulch for weed protection, use several sheets of newspaper, grocery bags, or cardboard under a thinner layer of mulch. In a study at the University of Vermont, a 6-inch layer of shredded newspaper applied at the beginning of one season allowed no more than 8 weeds per square yard to sprout for two summers. Without renewing the mulch layer, the newspaper controlled weeds for two seasons.
Don’t Bag Yard Clippings
Mow your lawn with a mulching blade and do not bag your clippings. Grass clippings will reseed your lawn by penetrating back into the soil as opposed to using heavy “fertilizers” to plump up its growth.
Add Organic Vegetable Seeds To Your Lawn
Dogs and cats love to eat grass for the B-vitamins, particularly B15 and B17, also known as nitrilosides. By keeping all toxic chemicals off your grass and by adding fresh “sprouts” into your lawn, your family pets can graze on a healthy variety of greens.
Periodically throw lettuce, kale, and spinach seeds onto your lawn, and let them fill in any bald spaces with nutrients rich in nitrilosides.
Vitamin D
Make sure to let your family pets outside each day for at least 20 minutes of healing sunshine. Vitamin D is not only healthy for you, but the sun is healing for for Fido and Garfield, too.
Horse And Cattle Health
Make sure your grazing fields and pastures are not toxic in harsh chemicals for grazing animals, like horses, goats, and cows. Organic pasture maintenance can be easily done using the tips above, especially when seeding a variety of grasses, grains, lettuces, and vegetables all together.
Pet Hair Analysis
If you want to know if your pet has been exposed to toxic chemicals, get a hair analysis done. I have done hair tests on dogs, cats, and horses. It will let you know if your cherished companion is accumulating toxins that can stress their immune systems.
I love all of my animals, and most of us do. Animals live a bit closer to the ground, so take the time to secure that they are not exposed to unnecessary toxic chemicals. They’ll thank you for it by living a long and happy life.
