Yes and no. I dunno about Canuckland, but here in the US, sidewalks are an easement; the public has a right to use them, they are maintained structurally by the government, but the landowner whose property they cross is responsible for snow and ice removal.
In the city of Minneapolis, they can fine you for failing to shovel your sidewalks.
For all practical purposes, it almost never happens. But in the rare cases where it does happen, what they usually do is send out a crew to shovel/clear it and then bill you for it.
Then again, Minneapolis is a bit weird/tight. It’s illegal to work on your own car or change your own oil in your own damned garage. But that’s another law that seldom gets enforced. Mostly only if you’re creating a nuisance and your neighbors are complaining a lot.
If it makes ya feel any better, my buddy and I were working on his car stereo the other day, and the front porch was quite icy. Another buddy showed up with some beer, and his first comment was, “You should have grabbed a handful of ice from work to spread on your porch!” :smack:
There’s a difference between drying his feet with a towel and having to set up a bowl of warm water ready to rinse salt from between his toes. 10 seconds of drying are easier than dunking four paws and making sure there’s no rock salt residue on them. Snow, mud, and slush also don’t irritate his pads. It’s not the biggest travesty in life, but it’s an annoyance on top of other winter annoyances.
I don’t have a cite in my back pocket, and no real inclination to dig for one. The stuff I buy says “safe and non toxic for animals, safe on concrete, blah blah blah”, my vet and numerous “dog people” have told me that rock salt is bad for dogs and I see the irritation on my dog’s paws after he walks on rock salt as opposed to the pellets, so I’ve never had a reason to doubt what I assumed was common knowledge. I can live with being wrong if that’s what your googling is turning up.
Actually not shoveling is sometimes better. If if melts a little the walk gets wet. Then it freezes into glass. The ones who did not shovel are less dangerous. You can not win. I have a curves walk to the porch. My wife always bitches if I do not shovel it, but no one walks on it. All deliverers walk across the lawn or make a straight path to the door.
Any chance it’s not the composition, but the shape that’s more irritating?
In this neck of the woods home or business owners are responsible to clear the portion of the sidewalk in front of their home, along with their own walkway/steps, etc.
Failure to do so can result in either fines, having someone from the city remove the ice/snow and bill you for it, or yes, even a lawsuit, which generally are won by the plaintif, even if the defendant is a business. (I personally know someone who was awarded a sizeable settlement from a business for exactly this reason - she slipped and fell on their icy sidewalk and badly injured her back).
I knew a guy who slipped and fell on someone’s icy sidewalk and broke his hip (this was a guy about 45 years old and in prime condition - no old lady with brittle bones). And yes, alice is right - you can bust your neighbour’s ass around here if they won’t clear the snow and ice. I’ve personally done it - I’ll give a reasonable amount of time to get the walk cleared, then I call it in. The next day, the walk is clear, like magical elves appeared overnight, and (hopefully) the homeowners got a lesson in homeowners’ responsibilities in Calgary.
Which reminds me - I have to go shovel my friggin’ walk again, for like the fifteenth time in two weeks. If I can do it, so can they.
I pit municipalities that don’t clear their own damn sidewalks(and I realize that’s most of them). Ottawa takes responsibility for clearing(and salting) the sidewalks and it works much, much better that way. The city I live in makes the owners of the property do it and my walk to work is terrible for the last 10 minutes.
Your experience is your experience, but don’t expect us to know what your pooch’s preferences are, when sites like this one state:
Or note the toxicity chart here.
Or how about this pet safety announcement from vets at Iowa State’s College of Veterinary Medicine:
Care to rethink your pitting of us using rock salt?
Those sites are partially wrong. CaCl isn’t really any more toxic than NaCl (salt). Nor is it caustic in the way that lye (NaOH) is. BUT, it is an irritant and can cause burns–not because it’s toxic or caustic, but because when it absorbs water, the dissolution reaction is exothermic and it can get pretty hot in the process. If you compare the MSDS for both substances, their hazard ratings are the same for all categories except Contact, because it’s more of an irritant, and more damaging, on contact with skin and mucous membranes.
Oh…kay? Why would I expect you to know what my dog’s “preferences” are? I said I’m happy to be wrong, I don’t have some big personal stake in rock salt being evil. That’s what I was told, and my experience seems to bear it out.
I humbly beg forgiveness for my hateful pitting of rock salt users. :rolleyes:
Could be! Rock salt is definitely more jagged and chunkier. The pellets don’t get lodged between his foot pads, maybe they just dissolve to mush when he steps on them?
It’s not really germane to my main point (which is how the fuck am I supposed to know what kind of salt your dog likes, especially when the frickin’ veterinary association in Iowa says to use sodium and potassium chloride instead of calcium chloride), but how is calcium chloride not more toxic when the LD50 of calcium chloride is 1000 mg/kg and sodium chloride is 3000 mg/kg?
Exactly.
Hey, you were the one pitting the rock salt users, implying that we’re cheapskates who wouldn’t shell out an extra two bucks to buy the “non-poisonous” calcium chloride (which appears to be worse, according to vets). If there’s anything I hate, it’s an undeserved, uninformed pitting.
Because those figures aren’t right, either. I suspect they’re comparing different animals/ingestion methods. From here:
I don’t see a significant difference here. Now, the rabbit eye irritation test, that’s another matter. It shows just how much more of a irritant CaCl is compared to rock salt.
My elderly mother biffed at her neighborhood gas station. She went inside, told the only employee that she fell. His response?
“I’m not going to be outside always throwing sand down for people”
She reiterated that she fell on his property, noted it was on the driver side of her truck. So he filled a coffee cup with sand and threw it in a glob on the passenger side of her truck. Asked if that made her happy. Not so much.
Hope you feel better Kythereia!
You highlighted potassium chloride and sodium chloride. I’ve been discussing calcium chloride and either potassium or sodium chloride, which as you note have similar toxicities. Your numbers show the 1000 and 3000 numbers I quoted above, unless I’m reading them incorrectly.
D’Oh. Stupid me. I bolded the wrong chemical. My apologies for that.
It also seems to say that calcium chloride is hazardous, while sodium and potassium chloride are not. Is that because it’s an irritant? I don’t know what “hazardous” means exactly on an MSDS.
Hazardous, in this case, refers to the safety data in Section 3 of the MSDS. In this case, they’re given as:
The MSDS for sodium chloride gives the Contact rating as 1. The higher those ratings go (they go from 0 to 5) the more hazardous a given substance is considered.
I’ll also note that different manufacturer’s MSDS may give slightly different ratings for one or more categories–but in most cases, not by much. A previous MSDS I looked in the course of this thread gave Contact as 2.