Thanks for your help! I never intended for this pile to be compost, that's why there's dog poo in it. It started as just a convenient place to dump my leftover leaves and other yard waste that I don't put it my main compost bin. But now the debris pile is getting a little too big, so if possible I'd like to turn it into a compost pile and put it to good use. It's just that I've been mixing dog poop in with the leaves for the past year, so I'm worried about contamination. As far as I know, my dog is healthy, but I'm still not very keen on taking any unnecessary risks. I rinse my vegetables, but I don't use any soap. If the existing pile is salvageable, I'll turn it into compost and find a better place to dispose of my dog's waste (he's a corgi, so there isn't a ton of it). There aren't many greens in the pile, so it probably won't be ready to use until next year. Will a year be long enough for all the "bad stuff" to die off?

I mulch all of my flowerbeds and veggie beds with grass clippings my neighbor provides. He collects them the first month or so of the season. This month the clippings were mixed with fall leaves he had missed and heated up nicely where he dumped them behind my fence. I added a lot of this batch to the compost bins...have 7 working right now. Peggy

The best investment I've ever made for my dogs was a doggie water bed. I live in northern Minnesota and have no air conditioning. Summers can reach into the 90's, so the house can become unbearably hot. During my old Moondog's last few years, she was no longer able to regulate her body temperature effectively, so she was dangerously and miserably hot during the summers. She would lie on her regular bed, unable to sleep because she was panting so hard. I was afraid she would heat stroke. The only way she survived was by my hosing her off in the front yard and then putting a fan on her in the house. Then I bought the water bed. Within minutes of putting it on the floor and filling it for her, she was blissfully and soundly asleep on it with absolutely NO panting. That water bed vastly improved the quality of the last couple of summers of her life. The bed I bought holds about 6 gallons of water, most of which is held in its absorbent core layer. The plastic outer surface is very easy to wipe clean, though it has sprung a few small leaks over the last few years. The leaks are slow enough not to cause any significant problem. The magic of the water bed is that it absorbs the dog's body heat and dissipates it so that the dog is instantly cooled. It's remarkably effective, assuming the dog will lie on it. Most of my dogs ... and I ... enjoy lying on it during the heat of summer. I strongly recommend a doggie water bed. I believe I purchased mine through Foster & Smith. Laurie

The reported estrogenic effects appear to my semi-educated eye to be of concern. There is a lot of space between 'no effect' and 'death by cancer' - i.e. chronic effects - where we are not looking hard enough, in my opinion. I do take issue whenever someone says "X was found to cause cancer in studies" which this web page does (quoting studies from the 80s), when it's done without regard for the doses used. Those studies (of necessity) jack up the concentrations until effects are observed in a small population of mice (rats, rabbits etc.). Then the dose-response relationship curve is extrapolated downward. They did a pretty good job in the first part of this article explaining the relevance of the concentrations related to toxic effects, but the author fell down on the 1980s studies. EPA is pretty conservative in their approach with regard to the amount of data required before they change policy for any given chemical. Numerous studies are considered as a whole package. Not making judgements on that, it is what it is. It will be interesting to see where this goes. Bottom line, we *know* there are chemicals in everything from our yards to gas tanks to computer keyboards that may have toxic effects at some level. Saying "Such and such is a carcinogen" as Elmer did above is not very relevant without a lot more information attached.