Pet hates in the garden

The lawn is a natural playground for dogs and cats, but you can minimise the damage they cause, says Kya deLongchamps.

To you, it’s the cultivated, sylvan quarter-acre. To them, it’s a wild, outdoor world crossed by a myriad of scents and potential activities necessary to a domesticated animal’s sanity. Cats and dogs will mark, dig, and do a fair amount of incidental damage around the garden.

Rooting up beds, to defecate or to investigate, tearing up lawns in play and marking behaviour, is natural to them.