HELP my sick cat won’t take her medicine?
ok so my 2 year old cat (she is stray)
but i took her to the vet who gave her 3 types of medicine + after that i’m getting her fixed
so she have an infection and tape worms
when i was giving her the antibiotics she HATED it
they vet told me it’s ok to crush it and add it to her food
so i did she will eat then suddenly have a funny face and would stop eating
i will hold her with one hand and put the bowl in front of her mouth with my other hand until she eat most of it
she make noises and get angry and hide under the table
but the medicine helped her ALOT i don’t want her to get sick
oh and the first day she was drooling like crazy all over the place and she was angry at me and she ran to a place she thinks "i can’t reach"
so today i started the last type of medicine (deworming) i gave her the first pill (crushed into whipped cream) the min she tasted the medicine she went away and made voices and made funny faces with her tongue like she was chewing it or something
so i gave her a spoon of canned food to let "bad taste "go away
it worked
but i tried giving her the whipped cream she refused to take
i pushed it through her mouth
she licked it a bit and started drooling ALOT and made a face that broke my heart
i gave her more canned food and hugged her
then i gave her the medicine with canned food of course that did not work also
i say she had 50% of her medicine
but i let it go
next pill i want away to ensure she have it all
i played with her extra time to makeup for her
oh i called the vet she said she drools because the medicine tasts horrible
i tried yogurt did not even touch it
i treid canned food (her fav type ) little help
i tried whipped cream and also add on top her fav dry food
nothing really works =(
no i don’t want to try that way because she is a biter
and she hates tuna
Hi stop being so nice she won’t get better by being nice
get a large towel and wrap her up so she can’t scratch or run off open her mouth gently and push the pill to the back of her mounth not all the way but quite far
next close her mouth and hold closed she will swallow almost immediately and won’t taste it much
sounds bad but done quick and gently is much better than messing around and dragging it out she may worry you are trying to poison her food
The most reliable way to give a pill to a cat is to properly open their mouth and drop the pill in. You can try all sorts of other things, but when it comes down to it, the only sure way is to "pill" the cat.
I speak from 22 years experience with 26 cats, many of which need to take medication for various conditions. I’ve tried the "pill pocket" treats, sprinkling it on the food, putting it their mouth and holding their mouth shut and rubbing their throat or blowing in their face — nothing works as good as simply doing it the proper and best way.
The best way to "pill" a cat is -
- have the cat sitting upright in front of you, you can have them on you lap on or a bed or table. If you are right handed, have them facing to the right.
- grasp the top of their mouth with your left hand with your palm on their face. You are cupping your hand around the top of their muzzle.
- pull their mouth open, bending the head backwards. This will open up their mouth. You can pull back quite a bit without hurting the cat – quite a bit. You’ll know if you try to go to far, the cat will tell you. You want to open their mouth completely.
- you want to position them such that there is a straight path, straight down from the front of their mouth to the back of their throat. You want a vertical path from the front of their mouth to the back.
- drop the pill into their mouth, aiming to get the pill past the base of their tongue without it touching, and possibility hanging up on, any part of their mouth. The trick is to drop the pill straight down past their tongue.
- if you get the pill past their tongue, they will usually swallow it. If you don’t get the pill far enough, reach in with your index finger and poke the pill past their tongue. Just reach in and do a quick poke and pull your finger out. It is possible to push the pill too far and get it in the windpipe but it is very, very hard to do.
You’ll have people tell to close the cat’s mouth and then do things like rubbing their throat and blowing in their face to get them to swallow the pill. That is pretty much a bunch of malarkey. If you drop the pill into their mouth and it clears the base of their tongue, they are going to swallow it.
One of the problems you can have is that you don’t pull their head back far enough to give you a straight path down past the tongue. Pull their head right back, open their mouth as much as possible. Get a vertical path straight down into their throat.
Or you will have the pill hang up on their tongue or the side of their mouth. The best thing to do is to try and push it far enough with your index finger. If that won’t work, take the pill out – your cat may help by spitting it out – and try again. You might want to dry the pill off a bit with your fingers.
If I could show you how to do this, you would see how simple the procedure really is.
Do not be afraid about getting bitten. If you work smoothly and quickly, you’ll have the pill down them before they can close their mouth. And, if you are holding their mouth open all the way, it will be very difficult for them to close their mouth on your finger.
Don’t be hesitant about this – just do it. Don’t try and do it really slow and carefully, just do it.
One of our cats, Felix, picked up some worms and the medication was to be sprinkled on his food. He would not eat it.
I got some empty gelatin capsules at a health food store and put the medicine in them. It took 5 of the little capsules to hold all of one dose of the medicine.
When he was due a dose, I had to put 5 capsules down his throat.
Now, I have some 22 years of practice pilling cats, but it was very easy to drop the capsule into his mouth and follow it with my index finger to push it far enough so that he would swallow it if they hung up, and follow up with the next.
All five went down – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 It just took seconds.
A lot of health food stores sell empty capsules because they have customers who make up their own supplement mixtures. The ones I bought came in a bag labeled "Manufactured by Now Foods." When I bought them, maybe 5 years ago, they were priced at $12 for a thousand of the "3" Extra Small Size. That size seems to work well – your can get a lot of a medications into them and they are easy to get down the cat’s throat.
I may never need to by more – 1,000 capsules are going to last a very long time.
Some medications taste really bad and so the pill is coated to prevent the "patient" from tasting the medication. If you have to give a cat a half or a quarter of a pill, you have to cut it and that exposes the medication and the cat will taste it and give you trouble getting it down his or her throat.
If you have to give a cat a portion of a pill, put it in an empty gelatin capsule and the cat will not taste the medication as the capsule goes down.
Empty capsules can also be used for liquids if you are able to fill the capsule, get the top on, and get it down the cat’s throat before the liquid dissolves the capsule. I did it to get a liquid into Tom but it was a real mess – at least for me.
Pilling a cat takes practice, confidence, and faith that the cat will not bite you when you put your fingers in their mouth but you can pill just about any cat.
There is a product for pilling cats – it is a treat with a pocket into which you put the pill. I think it is called Pill Pocket or Pet Pocket – go search on Google for: cat treat pill pocket
You should find it.
Some people, when pilling a cat, will kneel down on the floor and put the cat between their legs, facing away from them.
They then pull the top of the mouth back to open up the pill path and drop the pill down the cat’s throat.
I rarely need to restrain a cat like that to give them a pill – it depends upon the cat.
Also, there is a device which I think is called a "piller." It is a plastic rod with a plunger. You put the pill at the end of the rod, put the rod into the cat’s mouth, at the back, and you press the plunger to push the pill off the rod and into the mouth.
The idea is not to "shoot" the pill in to the cat’s mouth but merely to deposit it far enough back that the cat will swallow the pill.
Here’s a web page with a photo of one of these pillers – I don’t know anything about that site, just referring you there to look at the photo.
http://www.thecatconnection.com/page/TCC/PROD/SUP-2502
You can try the treats, put the pill in food, any of the other things, but the only sure way to get a pill down a cat’s throat every time, and be sure it went down, is to put it there yourself using the method I have described.
One last thing, if you consider grinding up a pill to give it to the cat, check with your vet first. Some pills must be given whole, with the coating intact, either because they taste very bad or they need the coating to get the pill past the stomach before it dissolves.
Good luck
our cats do that but in the end you hav to put some butter on the pill and put it in her mouth (make sure she swallows it )then give her a treat after.
Feline Greenies pill pockets. I haven’t used them yet, but they sound like a wonderful idea. Disguise the pill as a treat!
yikes. what always worked best for me was to mix it in with yogurt.
not much help but it couldn’t hurt to try it.
have u tried putting it in her mouth whole and making her swallow it! becareful she might bite u. Try tuna with oil she might not taste the pill so much.