Struggling…. I tried putting the content in their food and no luck either
Thanks for the tips :)
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We used a two person system.
One held the cat close to their body, securing the front paws against the cat with one hand and securing the head with the other hand. You have to secure the back hips against you with your arm or elbow.
The other pushed the pill into the cat’s mouth, held it shut and stroked the throat.
After a few months the cat realized struggling wasn’t worth the effort and only tried to claw our faces off if we got complacent.
We miss her very much.
Pill pockets
Plus Purina FortiFlora probiotic stuff. It’s irresistible powder my vet recommended, and it works amazing if you shake the pill pocket in that stuff
This is the most effective for my cat, but just be sure they don’t eat the treat around the pill and then spit the pill out.
Might I recommend the Inaba Churu pockets? We’ve been jamming pills into our girl’s hell-scented maw for years but these have made such a huge difference. We insert one pill per pocket and she pounces on and gobbles them up. Now giving her pills is fun instead of leaving us with terrible smelling fingers served with a side of feline childhood trauma.
I make pockets from meat.
- Cut meat into bits of one cubic centimeter.
- Cut pocket with scissors or knife. One incision makes a pocket.
- Cut pill into ~10 fragments and insert into the pockets with tweezers. Squeeze the pocket open to avoid touching the outside of the meat bit with the bitter pill fragment.
I’ve found that if you hold the cat in your lap, use the finger and thumb of one hand to wiggle on either side of their face where their mouth begins to open their mouth, if you can then get the pill on the very furthest part of their tongue closest to their throat, there is an automatic reflex to swallow. I used to try putting it in their food and it never worked. This worked every time.
You might ask if they have the meds in a liquid solution. My cat’s on some anti seizure meds, was very tricky about eating around even crushed up pill etc. The liquid solution cost marginally more (less than 5% difference I think) and is significantly easier to give and more importantly, be sure she ingested exactly as much as she should.
There’s a technique to hold their jaw and put the tablet at the back of the tongue which I’ve had success with, but I hate doing it. Look it up before trying because my memory is fuzzy.
I’ve had great luck though with pulverizing the shit out of a pill (uncoated, prednisone) and mixing with wet food. Like to powder with the back of a spoon, not just chunks.
🤔 this seems like “How to transform your domesticated cat into a tiger 101”
Yeah for the more ferocious fighters out there this would be extremely difficult to pull off but many house cats can be done this way.
You place the pill on the top of your index finger, right hand. Then you take the thumb and index finger of your left hand, form a C shape pincer with them, and then oinch at their gumline on either side to force their jaw apart. You’ll have a moment when their mouth is open and you can see their tongue - you have to poke that pill as far back on their tongue as you can. They will gag and recoil and lick lick lick the air, but hopefully the pill has gone down in that process.
This is the way.
I do this every night with 2 pills. I just did it 3 minutes ago, in fact.
Lay cat in lap. Grab head and kinda hold/lightly pinch cheeks with left hand. With right hand force your fingers pinching the pill into the back of the throat. Push it as far back as quickly as you can with your pointer finger. Hold him to make sure it gets swallowed.
Apologize and give him a little scratch and kiss.
Basically it feels like you’re trying to see the inside of a python’s throat. Equally as dangerous.
I would use the Meow Mix Irresistibles soft treats and wrap it around the pill. With my last cat, she associated the pill bottle with treats over time and would just take the pill by itself as a treat!
Late in life, she was having a lot of health issues, and one of the pills she had to take was bitter and without a coating. It ended up ruining the Irresistibles treats for her and I couldn’t get her to take them for the life of me.
I grind it like, snorting fine, and sprinkle it wet food and stir, has always worked for me.
Remember to check with your veterinarian if it’s okay to pulverize the pills, some medications are slow release and crushing them is probably bad
Oh good to know thanks!
Method I use because my cats are really tolerant:
- Open mouth gently and give treat
- Repeat couple of times
- Feed pill with a treat
- ???
- profit
It depends on what the medication is. Mostly I just crush it up and mush it into a Churu or their food or something. If they need to be on an empty stomach, like if I need them to have some gabapentin before a vet visit but they need to be on an empty stomach, I’ll dose their water.
Depending on the cat, you may need to look into a different medication, especially if it’s one of the ones with weird flavors, like cherry Clavamox; I’ll see if I can get an abx injection instead.
Worse comes to worse, you can try getting the medication compounded into a different form or a different flavor. The one thing I absolutely insist on getting compounded are appetite stimulants: the cat doesn’t want to eat anyway, and me forcing something down his throat is going to make him more likely to try to avoid both me and the food. I get transdermal ciproheptadine (mirtazapine can make some of them agitated, and I’d rather be certain that any weirdness is their illness and not the treatment). You just gently rub some on their inner ear and an hour later they want to eat :)
You can try to crush it in smaller fragments and embed it in wet food, but I don’t think it’s ever easy (except with animals that gulp down food in half a second maybe)
Pill pockets can work, but some cats will eat around the pill.
Personally, I’ve had the most success using cheese slices. As in, the highly processed plastic wrapped “cheese”. Tear off a bit, wrap it around the pill and kinds of smoosh it around the pill, and just like that, it’s irresistible to kitties.
I give my cats malt paste regularly. They lick it from my fingers and like it a lot. When they need pills from the vet I simply put them into the paste. They don’t even really notice and there is no struggle at all.
I clamp the cat between me and a wall whilst petting and then gently open his mouth and after massage the pill down. If we do it elsewhere he will scratch and go mayhem, this way he stays still and calm
Pill pockets are the only way we can get our cat to take her pills. But we’ve had to put the pills into little gelatin capsules and wrap those in pills pockets because the pills are bitter. If my cat gets a taste of the bitter pills and the pill pocket, she’ll never eat the pill pocket flavor again.
Why don’t they make cat (and dog) pills taste like a treat? It can’t be that hard!
It’s not hard it’s more expensive. Heartworm and flea and tick meds come in treat form.
cats also tend to be a lot more finicky about different foods :(
True, but my lot wolf down different treats.
They make pill pocket soft treats for both cats and dogs, and depending on the medication, some places will just make a medicated soft treat.
My elder cat was having kidney problems, wouldn’t take pills, would eat around the pill to eat the pill pocket treat, and would violently shake her head if you tried using liquid meds. Eventually, I found an online pet pharmacy that would just blend her kidney meds right into a soft chew treat… unfortunately, this was several years ago, and I can not remember the name of the site I used.
