How to Give a Pet Medication Without a Fight

If you are currently losing this particular battle, you are in very ordinary company. Prescriptions fail far more often at home than at the clinic. The animal takes three doses, becomes wise to the whole operation, the owner gives up, and the infection returns resistant to the drug that would have cleared it.

Almost all of that is technique, and technique can be learned in an afternoon.

Tablets: dogs

Usually straightforward.

1. Hide it in food the dog values: a small amount of soft food, wrapped so the tablet cannot be tasted
2. Use the three-treat trick. Give a plain treat, then the one containing the tablet, then another plain one immediately. Dogs swallow the second in anticipation of the third
3. Check the mouth afterwards. Dogs are good at holding a tablet in a cheek and dropping it later

If it must go in directly: tilt the head up, open the jaw, place the tablet as far back over the tongue as you can reach, close the mouth, hold it gently closed and stroke the throat. Follow with water or food so it does not lodge in the oesophagus, which matters particularly with capsules.

Tablets: cats

Harder, and worth doing properly rather than fighting.

• Wrap the cat in a towel with only the head out. This protects you and calms most cats
• Use a pill giver if you have one, which keeps fingers out of the mouth and places the tablet far enough back
• Follow with a small amount of water by syringe or with food. Cats hold tablets in the oesophagus more readily than dogs, and some medications cause damage if they sit there
• Watch for two minutes. Cats will hold a tablet and spit it out once you stop paying attention

Ask whether the medication comes as a liquid, a paste, or a long-acting injection. For a cat that genuinely cannot be tabletted, that question saves the course.

Liquids

Syringe into the pouch between the cheek and the teeth, not straight down the throat. Go slowly, allowing swallowing between small amounts.

Never squirt liquid quickly into the back of the mouth. It is easily inhaled, and aspiration pneumonia is a serious complication of a well-meant dose.

Eye drops

1. Clean discharge away first with damp cotton
2. Steady the head from behind, tilting the nose up slightly
3. Rest your hand against the head so you move with the animal rather than against it
4. Drop into the eye without touching the surface with the nozzle
5. Wait five minutes between different eye medications, or the second washes out the first

Ear drops

Fill the canal, then massage the base of the ear for twenty or thirty seconds, which is the step most people skip and the one that carries medication around the bend of the L-shaped canal. Let the animal shake afterwards, then wipe only what you can see.

What not to hide medication in

• Milk, which causes diarrhoea in most adult cats and many dogs
• Chocolate or anything containing xylitol
• Onion-based food, which rules out most leftover stew
• A full meal. If the animal does not finish it, you do not know how much medication it had
• Dairy, for certain antibiotics, which bind to calcium and are absorbed poorly. Ask when dispensed

Finish the course

The most important instruction and the most ignored. Animals feel better long before an infection is cleared, and stopping early selects for the bacteria that survived.

This is how ear infections recur monthly, how skin infections become resistant, and how a second course becomes necessary at a higher cost than finishing the first.

If a course is genuinely impossible to complete, say so at the clinic rather than abandoning it quietly. There is usually an alternative.

Worth asking when it is dispensed

1. With food or without?
2. What do I do if a dose is missed?
3. What side effects are expected, and which mean stop and call?
4. Does this come in another form if my animal will not take tablets?
5. Do I need a recheck to confirm it worked?

Medication given badly is money spent for a partial result, and it is the reason a great many second visits happen at all. Getting the technique right at the first attempt is worth more than most owners realise.

Consultations and treatment are covered on Skeepy Pet HMO plans at any vet clinic in Nigeria, including the recheck that confirms a course actually worked rather than merely felt like it did.