Help with dog friendly yard landscaping

Our dogs are very hard on backyards plus we have large shade trees. This produced muddy areas that require dog baths every time it rained. Grass does not grow under the trees and such so I had a brilliant idea. First I roped off the area in back (576 sq. ft) to work on. The area is on a slight slope also. I killed whatever sort of grass that was there, dug up the clumps, laid down weed stop fabric and then poultry mesh (so they cannot dig). I then ordered pine straw bales to spread over ground and then I was going to put some stepping stone down randomly to help keep mulch in place and like make paths and some shade plants in containers. I thought this would look nice. Problem, the pine straw is so fluffy - it just sort of is there? Will it flatten out? Will this be too fluffy for the dogs to run in and will it constantly be moving round? We have to walk out there too and clean up after dogs? Should I return what I did not use and perhaps use crushed stone instead (white stone for less heat retention). I just don't know now. What do you think?

We don't have pine straw mulch out here, but I can tell you that redwood bark mulch (which I expect is heavier and less fluffy than pine straw) does not hold up very well when my 30 lb sheltie gets running around on it (he has a spot by the fence in my front yard where he runs back and forth barking at people in the street, and I'm constantly having to rearrange the mulch after he messes it up). I've had much better luck with the crushed stone that I have in my backyard--mine is a grayish gravel that the landscapers called "quarter minus" (that refers to the size, all the pieces are less than 1/4 inch), it packs down very nicely and stays in place when he runs on it. At my old house I also had small river rocks (about an inch or 2 in size) and those worked fine too. Bigger river rocks become hard to walk on, and smaller rounded rocks like pea gravel will never stay in place so if you want rounded stones I'd go with the 1-2" size. And for the rough-edged rocks, I definitely recommend the quarter minus size, anything bigger isn't going to pack together as well. You could also use decomposed granite, it also packs down nicely. But with both of those options you will have best results if you rent a compacter or at the least spend some quality time with the hand tamper. And at least with the gravel, it seems like it's always a little looser at first even if you tamp it down, but then after our winter rains it packed down really nicely, so you may want to hose it down a bit too as you're tamping it down. Once it's all firmly settled, the dogs will probably track in a few pieces of rock here and there but I haven't had too much trouble with that.

I think Ecranes idea is by far the best one, the only warning I would offer is to check the dogs feet pads regularly as the gravel sometimes got stuck between my dogs pads and this can cause them to bite the top of their feet as they cant reach the pads so easily, so it was always a ritual when they came indoors and settled, check these dogs feet, my dogs were chows and were heavy footed so this wont apply to all breads, but it can cause really sore feet if you dont notice the stones stuck there between the pads until the feet are really painful. good luck. WeeNel.