Butter makes the medicine go down. After another horrific experience pilling Maggie, I called the vet to see how bad it would be to not finish the medication. Normally, I’m a big fan of following the doctor’s orders, but Maggie was hiding from us. Her fur was lank and matted from the dried froth–I’m not even exaggerating–and I felt like we were torturing her.
The vet suggested coating the pill in butter, because it would seal in the bitterness and also make it slippery. Willing to try anything, I buttered the pill. Lo! It worked! She was even licking her lips and climbed into my lap afterwards. Such relief for all of us.
Edited to add: Well, it worked this morning. At the moment Maggie has a handle-bar mustache of foam.
Hi Mary,
Sorry to read about the struggles with pilling your kitty! Something that might help: I remember seeing a contraption for pilling that sort of “shoots” the pill into the back of the kitty’s throat. I don’t know if they’re readily available, but I remember the vets in the clinic I worked at an eon ago using something like that for difficult kitties. The other thing you could try, if she’s not a feisty kitty, is with one hand, using a little pressure to open her mouth and with the other, shove the pill in as far as it will go. Then, clamp her mouth shut. We have a cat that’s hard to pill and that usually works (unless you’ve tried that method, of course.)
Good luck! I’m sorry your girl is presenting such a challenge….
Bury it in a small gob of soft cheese–the stinkier the better–and see if that helps. Cream cheese works, but goat cheese works better. 🙂
“Butter the Pill”
Isn’t that a NAdine Gordimer novel? Jeez, I should do this with the cat sometimes. George Foreman had to get some kind of antibiotic for a wound he received in a fight (this is my cat I’m talking about) and so I had to administer a syringe of pink goo every morning. I wish the vet had said just try to tie your shoes while driving on the highway. It would have been easier. And the cat is a fighter, so I needed der huge gloves to get the beast in place. By the last day of the meds, I was a champ at it but my hands had scars for weeks afterwards.
Butter the pill indeed…
Maggie looks like a delicate flower but she is feisty and hates this. We have her wrapped in a towel, pinned, and can get her mouth open. She’s just astonishingly good at getting the pill back out of her mouth.
We’ll give cream cheese a try this morning. Fortunately we only have three more days of this torture.
Cut the tip off a plastic syringe, put the buttered pill in the syringe and stick into the throat and shoot it down. That is how I was taught to get pills down a fiesty cat (the towel thing the other essential).
Good luck,
SamA