Just breaks my heart to seem my dogs pick up their paws in pain from the salt

My landlord, who lives in Los Angeles, hired a new guy to do snow removal. And the guy is milking him -- it snowed 1/2" last week as temps were rising above freezing. The new guy scrambled over here during the snowfall and runs all his gear dumps pounds of salt everywhere but he leaves snow and ice on the steps that lead down to the walkways (?) It went to 45F quiickly and everything melted except for the piles he made.

This morning I was awakened at 4:50AM to the sound of scrapping shovels. It was still snowing -- the middle of the storm and the middle of the night and this guy is out there pushing snow around then dumping 20 pounds of brown salt all over everything.

Last year the old snow guy retired. I had him trained -- he could just do the neighbors place and I would do my landlord's walkways. He had run over rose bushes, curbs, gravel in planter beds, he ran over the tie outs for my dogs, shredded my doormat and finally busted his machine when he ran over about 4 feet of chain.

I understand that people need to make money but there is a right way and time to move snow and a destructive, expensive way to do it. The expensive way is to hire someone who has never seen your yard without snow and let them just scrape around all over the place. Let them dump enough salt to kill your trees, grass and bushes. Let them push your gravel driveway and 6 feet of lawn into a big pile in the middle of your yard.

The better way is to wait until it stops snowing, use a broom on the high stuff -- steps, railings -- and then shovel only a path. And if ain't ice, don't salt it.

When I got up to look out and see if it really was the new idiot shoveling at 5AM, my dogs got up too. And they wanted to go out so we did. After a quick loop, the male went down on his side in some snow and curled his paws over his chest in pain. Like they had been burned. He weighs 100 pounds or I would have carried him in from there. I go them in and wiped their paws then went out and scraped all the salt I could off the stairs and walkways.

I'm going to ask the guy not to do our walkways. If necessary I will pay him not to. -- end of rant --