There was a book years ago entitled ‘Captions Courageous.’ Amongst other items, it showed the classical statue ‘The Death of Laocoon and his Sons.’ (See link. below.) The caption underneath it was laocoon’s last agonised cry: “Will someone please answer the phone..!!”
Have already sent this on! Fortunately, I have not yet had to give either of my current cats a pill, and the dog is easy. Just stick it in peanut butter (yuck).
Two of my cats get pills daily. Zeno is happy to take his (for type 2 diabetes) wrapped in “pill pocket” treat designed for this purpose – he considers it a tasty snack. Tugger is not as fond of the flavour of pill pockets, so administering his amitriptyline is a 2 person endeavour – spouse gently but firmly holds the cat and grabs the scruff of his neck, and I get to open the cat’s mouth and insert the pocket-wrapped pill. (These days we have about 90% success on the first try.) Then apologies are given by way of a bunch of praise, skritches, and crunchy treats. For other fun activities, these guys also get B12 injections every few weeks, which is a bit more challenging.
I watched a bit of “Arctic Vets” on CBC last night. One segment was about vaccinating an elk in an enclosure by giving her treats while the vet stuck her with a needle on the end of a pole. It took a lot of patience before she lined up within reach of the pole.
Theo — have you tried grinding the pills and mixing the powder into your cat’s favorite wet food? This has worked for 5-6 years to medicate our hyperthyroid Manxie.
It CAN be a bit like the coevolutionary duel between covid variants and vaccines — eventually she sussed onto the meds dosed in the original “chicken pate” but doesn’t notice [or doesn’t care] when I switched the carrier to “ocean pate”..
For my dog I smear peanut butter halfway up the outside of a peashooter – a non-bendy straw suffices so long as the bore is wide enough for the pill – and sit the pill inside the shooter at the non-smeared end. On to my knees, shooter to my lips, the dog opens wide to start licking the peanut butter, and once the shooter is in a line with the back of his throat it’s a sharp puff and down goes the pill (important not to inhale once the shooter is between my lips – that’s a mistake I won’t make….again!). At least once a week I give him the peanut butter without the pill; that way he soon forgets to be suspicious of the technique.
My trombone hobby made me read “peashooter” initially as the slang term for a small-bore tenor trombone. Rather than, you know, a straw of similar dimension used for shooting peas, who ever thinks of those things.
That’s a genius method. Also even if he did get suspicious of the technique it still wouldn’t be much of a thing, when all he has to do is gulp once to send the pill on its way. None of that war between the tongue and the pill.
We’ve never had to use the pea shooter with our terrier. We just wrap it in peanut butter and he gobbles it up without noticing the pill. When we put it in his wet food, he wouldn’t eat the food. Of course, that might be because he felt too sick to eat until after he got the pill…sort of a catch 22
Thank you. It does take advantage of two qualities that my dog has in abundance: a love of peanut butter and a propensity for being duped, or what Jane Austen might have labeled Greed and Gullibility.
iknklast, I did initially try just immersing a pill in peanut butter back when he was a pup: he took the blob of butter, rolled it around his tongue, swallowed, then ever-so cockily dropped the pill onto my foot*. That was when I knew drastic measures were called for.
*He does a similar thing if I give him a small bowl of stew or – his absolute favourite – curry. He’ll dig in and when he’s done there’ll be a small pile of mushrooms left, all licked perfectly clean. I once counted how many mushroom slices were in the stew I put in his bowl and it tallied perfectly with the perfectly cleaned slices he left.
There is a delightful book, How to Live With a Calculating Cat, mostly cartoons with lots of humor and a bit of good advice. The cartoon about many unsuccessful methods of administering pills ends by saying sometimes the only way to win is to cheat: the human grinds the pill onto the cat, who then ingests the pill via grooming.
AoS, my dog insists on having a Brussels sprout whenever I cook them. He never eats the sprout, but he loves to play with it. If I have cheese on it, he will lick the cheese off, roll the vegetable around the floor until he gets tired of it, and leave it for someone to step on later in their bare feet.
And my cats have some sort of thing about their bowls. One of them will only eat out of the white bowl, unless the other one is eating out of the blue bowl, in which case she must have the blue bowl. Scuffle ensues; two cats enter, one cat leaves.
My father used to have the coolest black lab ever (besides Cooper of course!), but the hungriest animal I have ever seen (And I like fishing northern pikes!). Every time we fed her, I’m convinced she thought it was the last meal of her life, and she had to gobble it down as quickly as possible before it was taken away. She also had an unfortunate habit of begging at the table, and sometimes stealing food. You would not have any problems feeding her a pill (or anything else!)
I also sometimes used to look after an American Cocker spaniel for my landlady at the time. To him eating was all about of showing off, and so he wouldn’t eat anything unless he had an audience (“Look what I’m doing! Wow! Did you see that?! Hey! Are you paying attention?!”). Also, any food item I was currently eating was the most interesting and desirable object in the universe, but only as long as I was the one eating it. If I caved in and gave it to him (which occasionally happened…) he instantly lost interest and turned his attention to whatever else I was eating.
My father now has an adorable young golden retriever, but yet another totally different personality. With the black lab, the highlight of every Christmas was unwrapping her Christmas present from me: A bone! But when I tried the same with the golden, she sniffed at it, held it in her mouth for a few seconds, and then put it down and walked away.
That last meal thing is exactly like Cooper; exactly. Frantic chomp-swallow-chomp as if the food were going to dissolve into nothing in 30 seconds. Every time. 10 years haven’t taught him that the food doesn’t dissolve into nothing.
That’s a common problem with Labradors, they have no concept of being full and will eat until they burst if they get the chance.
Ophelia Benson
April 17, 2021 at 6:50 pm
“Very well then my good man, I will fire it DOWN YOUR THROAT.”
Blimey, it’s like you were in the room :-)
A slight aside: what do you all think of the new fad for cross-breeding and giving the pups a portmanteau name as though they’re a ‘proper’ breed? I decided it might have gone too far when talking to a dog-owner recently. She has a Labradoodle and said that she was hoping to breed it with a Cockerpoo to produce…..Labracockerdoodlepoos!
The fact that the ‘oodle’ and ‘poo’ both relate to the poodle part didn’t seem to occur to her, so I suggested that she then breed the offspring with a Jackapoo to get Labrajackacockerdoodlepoopoos, and she said that I was just being silly! At least she got that right.
Pfft, Hercules is making the basic mistake of not wearing full body armour and falconry gloves for the task.
AoS, if you were using a proper pea shooter you would be safe from accidental inhalation of your dog’s meds. Family legend has it that my brother is partly responsible for the safety mouthpiece found on pea shooters these days – he nearly died when he was 6 after accidentally inhaling a pea. Then he nearly died again a few weeks later from pneumonia because the pea had gone as far as possible into his lung. The doctor treating him was appalled and said he would do something to prevent this happening to another child, but the family legend does not go into the details of what exactly he did. So maybe a pinch of salt is advised.
Also, may I commend you for the (as I see it) correct spelling of “Cockerpoo”. Everyone I know spells it “Cockapoo” which looks to me more like a verb than a noun, if you see what I mean.
Haha. There’s a list to to be made there, I see some kind of -poo most days. I don’t mind the names as a fun way to describe a dog (mine’s a pugalier!), but now people are just mashing breeds together to get a funny name. Yes, it’s a Jackshit, that’s hilarious. Let’s see how funny you find it when you have to pay for the vet to shave it off once a year under general anaesthetic. Because what you’ve got is a dog that gets matted at the slightest breeze, is suspicious of strangers, has a short fuse and is always up for a good fight.
:D
There was a book years ago entitled ‘Captions Courageous.’ Amongst other items, it showed the classical statue ‘The Death of Laocoon and his Sons.’ (See link. below.) The caption underneath it was laocoon’s last agonised cry: “Will someone please answer the phone..!!”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laoco%C3%B6n_and_His_Sons
Have already sent this on! Fortunately, I have not yet had to give either of my current cats a pill, and the dog is easy. Just stick it in peanut butter (yuck).
Two of my cats get pills daily. Zeno is happy to take his (for type 2 diabetes) wrapped in “pill pocket” treat designed for this purpose – he considers it a tasty snack. Tugger is not as fond of the flavour of pill pockets, so administering his amitriptyline is a 2 person endeavour – spouse gently but firmly holds the cat and grabs the scruff of his neck, and I get to open the cat’s mouth and insert the pocket-wrapped pill. (These days we have about 90% success on the first try.) Then apologies are given by way of a bunch of praise, skritches, and crunchy treats. For other fun activities, these guys also get B12 injections every few weeks, which is a bit more challenging.
I watched a bit of “Arctic Vets” on CBC last night. One segment was about vaccinating an elk in an enclosure by giving her treats while the vet stuck her with a needle on the end of a pole. It took a lot of patience before she lined up within reach of the pole.
This is what it’s like giving my doberman his meds.
Theo — have you tried grinding the pills and mixing the powder into your cat’s favorite wet food? This has worked for 5-6 years to medicate our hyperthyroid Manxie.
It CAN be a bit like the coevolutionary duel between covid variants and vaccines — eventually she sussed onto the meds dosed in the original “chicken pate” but doesn’t notice [or doesn’t care] when I switched the carrier to “ocean pate”..
For my dog I smear peanut butter halfway up the outside of a peashooter – a non-bendy straw suffices so long as the bore is wide enough for the pill – and sit the pill inside the shooter at the non-smeared end. On to my knees, shooter to my lips, the dog opens wide to start licking the peanut butter, and once the shooter is in a line with the back of his throat it’s a sharp puff and down goes the pill (important not to inhale once the shooter is between my lips – that’s a mistake I won’t make….again!). At least once a week I give him the peanut butter without the pill; that way he soon forgets to be suspicious of the technique.
My trombone hobby made me read “peashooter” initially as the slang term for a small-bore tenor trombone. Rather than, you know, a straw of similar dimension used for shooting peas, who ever thinks of those things.
That’s a genius method. Also even if he did get suspicious of the technique it still wouldn’t be much of a thing, when all he has to do is gulp once to send the pill on its way. None of that war between the tongue and the pill.
We’ve never had to use the pea shooter with our terrier. We just wrap it in peanut butter and he gobbles it up without noticing the pill. When we put it in his wet food, he wouldn’t eat the food. Of course, that might be because he felt too sick to eat until after he got the pill…sort of a catch 22
Thank you. It does take advantage of two qualities that my dog has in abundance: a love of peanut butter and a propensity for being duped, or what Jane Austen might have labeled Greed and Gullibility.
snerk
iknklast, I did initially try just immersing a pill in peanut butter back when he was a pup: he took the blob of butter, rolled it around his tongue, swallowed, then ever-so cockily dropped the pill onto my foot*. That was when I knew drastic measures were called for.
*He does a similar thing if I give him a small bowl of stew or – his absolute favourite – curry. He’ll dig in and when he’s done there’ll be a small pile of mushrooms left, all licked perfectly clean. I once counted how many mushroom slices were in the stew I put in his bowl and it tallied perfectly with the perfectly cleaned slices he left.
“Very well then my good man, I will fire it DOWN YOUR THROAT.”
There is a delightful book, How to Live With a Calculating Cat, mostly cartoons with lots of humor and a bit of good advice. The cartoon about many unsuccessful methods of administering pills ends by saying sometimes the only way to win is to cheat: the human grinds the pill onto the cat, who then ingests the pill via grooming.
AoS, my dog insists on having a Brussels sprout whenever I cook them. He never eats the sprout, but he loves to play with it. If I have cheese on it, he will lick the cheese off, roll the vegetable around the floor until he gets tired of it, and leave it for someone to step on later in their bare feet.
And my cats have some sort of thing about their bowls. One of them will only eat out of the white bowl, unless the other one is eating out of the blue bowl, in which case she must have the blue bowl. Scuffle ensues; two cats enter, one cat leaves.
Oh yes, the personalities of animals..
My father used to have the coolest black lab ever (besides Cooper of course!), but the hungriest animal I have ever seen (And I like fishing northern pikes!). Every time we fed her, I’m convinced she thought it was the last meal of her life, and she had to gobble it down as quickly as possible before it was taken away. She also had an unfortunate habit of begging at the table, and sometimes stealing food. You would not have any problems feeding her a pill (or anything else!)
I also sometimes used to look after an American Cocker spaniel for my landlady at the time. To him eating was all about of showing off, and so he wouldn’t eat anything unless he had an audience (“Look what I’m doing! Wow! Did you see that?! Hey! Are you paying attention?!”). Also, any food item I was currently eating was the most interesting and desirable object in the universe, but only as long as I was the one eating it. If I caved in and gave it to him (which occasionally happened…) he instantly lost interest and turned his attention to whatever else I was eating.
My father now has an adorable young golden retriever, but yet another totally different personality. With the black lab, the highlight of every Christmas was unwrapping her Christmas present from me: A bone! But when I tried the same with the golden, she sniffed at it, held it in her mouth for a few seconds, and then put it down and walked away.
That last meal thing is exactly like Cooper; exactly. Frantic chomp-swallow-chomp as if the food were going to dissolve into nothing in 30 seconds. Every time. 10 years haven’t taught him that the food doesn’t dissolve into nothing.
That’s a common problem with Labradors, they have no concept of being full and will eat until they burst if they get the chance.
Blimey, it’s like you were in the room :-)
A slight aside: what do you all think of the new fad for cross-breeding and giving the pups a portmanteau name as though they’re a ‘proper’ breed? I decided it might have gone too far when talking to a dog-owner recently. She has a Labradoodle and said that she was hoping to breed it with a Cockerpoo to produce…..Labracockerdoodlepoos!
The fact that the ‘oodle’ and ‘poo’ both relate to the poodle part didn’t seem to occur to her, so I suggested that she then breed the offspring with a Jackapoo to get Labrajackacockerdoodlepoopoos, and she said that I was just being silly! At least she got that right.
These methods for medicating cats are all very interesting, but I own a Fortran.
Oh right, you totally “own” a Fortran, I’m sure she would confirm.
Yep, interesting use of ‘own’ there, latsot.
It’s called irony ;)
Pfft, Hercules is making the basic mistake of not wearing full body armour and falconry gloves for the task.
AoS, if you were using a proper pea shooter you would be safe from accidental inhalation of your dog’s meds. Family legend has it that my brother is partly responsible for the safety mouthpiece found on pea shooters these days – he nearly died when he was 6 after accidentally inhaling a pea. Then he nearly died again a few weeks later from pneumonia because the pea had gone as far as possible into his lung. The doctor treating him was appalled and said he would do something to prevent this happening to another child, but the family legend does not go into the details of what exactly he did. So maybe a pinch of salt is advised.
Also, may I commend you for the (as I see it) correct spelling of “Cockerpoo”. Everyone I know spells it “Cockapoo” which looks to me more like a verb than a noun, if you see what I mean.
Catwhisperer, isn’t Cockapoo found at the bottom of a birdcage?
Haha. There’s a list to to be made there, I see some kind of -poo most days. I don’t mind the names as a fun way to describe a dog (mine’s a pugalier!), but now people are just mashing breeds together to get a funny name. Yes, it’s a Jackshit, that’s hilarious. Let’s see how funny you find it when you have to pay for the vet to shave it off once a year under general anaesthetic. Because what you’ve got is a dog that gets matted at the slightest breeze, is suspicious of strangers, has a short fuse and is always up for a good fight.