How To Give Your Pet Oral Medication

How To Give Your Pet Oral Medication One of the most taxing ordeals is trying to give your animals medicine. They don't understand ingesting something that doesn't taste good to them. So naturally, your animal resists your attempts to feed them a pill.

At the same time, this is one of those cases where animal instinct doesn't work very well. Nothing in the wild taught these critters that they needed antibiotics. So you have to take matters into your own hands. This might mean tricking your animal into taking its medicine. It might mean forcing the animal to do the same. In the end, it's in your pet's best interest to swallow the bitter pill.

1. Use a Little Trickery

Your animal might be savvy to your medicated treat if you are straightforward about it. Feed them a snack without the medication to whet their appetite. Then slip in the medicated morsel once they are eating out of your hand. Don't feed them too much before you slip them the mickey, or else they might be more selective.

This trick works better for dogs than cats.

2. The Ballpark Frank

Dogs are usually easy. Break up their pill and place little segments in quarter-sized pieces of a hot dog. Dogs will gobble this up without knowing they took the medicine. If you have a large pill, break it up into four segments and bury each in each quarter of the ballpark frank.

If you don't have a hot dog laying around, then try peanut butter, cheese or butter. Remember that too much cheese isn't good for your doggies digestion.

3. A Spoonful of Sugar

If your horse isn't taking its medicine with the oats, then disguise the taste with molasses. If you coat the horse's medicated grain with molasses, this should do the trick.

4. The Land of Butter and Tuna

Amazingly enough, many cats will eat butter. Put their medicine inside a spoonful of butter.

Cats are the hardest animals to convince to take medicine orally. They are naturally finicky anyway, so anything with a slightly different taste they might avoid altogether. I had a cat that wouldn't eat anything but cat food and the occasional tuna, but not all the time. So anytime I gave him medicine orally, I put it in a bit of tuna.

5. The Fake Swallow

Some dogs are smart enough to let you put their pill in their mouth, then spit the pill out when you walk away. If you find your dog is the one being tricky, then give them the pill and then close their mouth for them. This should force them to swallow the pill. If this still doesn't work, then take a squirter and squirt a little bit of water into the side of their mouth. This should wash the pill down.

6. The Syringe

If your animal simply will not take medication in solid form, then have your veterinarian prescribe the medicine in an oral suspension. Put the right dosage in a syringe and shoot it in the pet's mouth. The animal won't too much like the process, but it's a quick and painless way (for you and your animal) to give your pet its much needed medicine.