Help your dogs to take their medication with these handy tips. Can you give your dog medication a number of times each day without any stress on you or your pooch? A recent discussion reminded me how hard it can be to get some dogs to take their medicine, and as most of Chemeyes products are tablets/capsules it might be helpful to summarise strategies that make the process relatively easy and stress-free.
1. Mix it in with the food. This is the most obvious option, and it works great for some dogs. It’s better to use tinned food or something moister than dry kibble. I’ve no idea how they do it but dogs seem to have an amazing ability to pick out the tiniest morsel from a bowl of kibble, whether that be something they do want to eat or something they don’t! If you use this method though, just be careful (if you have more than one dog), that the wrong dog doesn’t get the medicine!
If mixing with their food doesn’t work…
2. The Treat Game: The First thing to try is encasing the medicine in some highly palatable food, a piece of meat or some peanut butter. Give this to your dog and see what happens. Generally, they will enjoy the treat and its job done, but for the more discerning animal out there you might need to be a bit sneakier!! Put the medicine aside and give the dog a treat with no tablet. Then give the dog a second treat. Next, pick up the treat-encased tablet and put it right next to your dog’s nose, but don’t let him have it! Pull it away and tease him. Do this a couple more times to get him really interested in that particular treat and then let him have it. Quickly follow it up with a fourth treat. Unless the pill is really unpleasant (which most are not), this works really well and makes the process good fun.
3. The Competition Game: Alternate giving your dog a treat and giving the treat to either another dog or another person/animal in the room, two or four-legged. You are letting your dog see that another food lover is getting treats too, and if he doesn’t take his share he’ll miss out. Avoid this technique with other dogs if there is any food-related guarding or possessiveness in the house. If you’re not married this is a great test partner suitability for dog lovers. If the person you are dating won’t help out by being the “competitor,” you might want to look around. I’m just saying.
4. Empty Gel Caps: This is most suitable for really bad tasting medicines and can be used for liquids, tablets and powders. It’s pretty easy to get hold of empty capsules from the likes of Amazon and eBay and put a nasty-tasting pill inside so that your dog won’t reject it. The empty capsules are sizes according to a number scale with 00 being the biggest and 4 the smallest. As a guide, most regular capsules are size 0 and please take into consideration that the smaller capsules will hold less medicine.
5. Milk: In our experience, all dogs love milk. Our Hublot knows we make tea at about 10pm when we also let him out for a toilet break. When he gets in there’s always some milk waiting for him. Now he just goes outside and sits by the door. After his milky treat, he’ll be desperate to head back outside to finish the original toilet break! Milk works great for mixing powders and a crushed tablet will also go down a treat. Unless it is enteric coated / GI resistant this will also work with capsules which invariably contain powder.
6. Flavoured tablets are the final method to help your dogs to take their medication. One of the strategies that Chemeyes have employed to make swallowing tablets / capsules less of an issue is to produce flavoured products. Both Joint-Able and Chembiotics are chicken flavoured so your dogs will consider these to be a treat. With regular use, they may even get familiar with swallowing capsules/tablets and solve any existing problems with taking medicines!
This is one of those issues that seems really trivial until you have a sick dog who won’t help themselves get better. Especially with products like pancreatic enzymes that have to be taken with the food to ensure they work properly. If you have any additional suggestions, to help your dogs to take their medication we’d love to share them!