Are you having trouble giving your dog a pill? Getting your dog to swallow a pill isn’t easy.
Dogs have a super-sensitive sense of smell, and they usually know right away that what you’re giving them isn’t food!
It doesn’t help that most dog pet medicines are toxic in some way (though not dangerous at the prescribed doses), and most animals are physiologically conditioned to reject toxic substances.
After all, when was the last time you slowly chewed an ibuprofen tablet to savor the taste?
Hide the Dog Meds in Food
The easiest way to get your dog to take medicine is to disguise it in food. If you have a particularly smart dog, she may figure out that you’re feeding her pills.
The best solution on how to give your dog a pill is to either find a food she really loves and will never turn away, or switch up your methods every day while she’s on the prescription to catch her off her guard.
Here are a few methods that have been found to work well:
Coat it in peanut butter: Try putting a glob of it on a spoon and sticking the pill in the middle. Let her lick it off the spoon.
Most likely, she’ll swallow the pill along with the peanut butter. This method has a pretty good track record, but sometimes the dog will discover the pill and spit it out.
Stick it in a hotdog: This is one of the most successful methods, since most dogs go bonkers over hotdogs.
Keep a pack of precooked hotdogs in your fridge. When it’s time to give your dog her medicine, break off a bite-sized piece of hotdog and stick the pill inside.
Give it to your dog. She’ll gobble it right up and probably won’t even notice the pill. Other types of meat work just as well, but hotdogs are cheap, convenient, and easy to cut up into smaller pieces.
Force-feeding with butter: If your dog has caught onto the fact that all of those surprise goodies have bad-tasting medicine in them, you’ll have to resort to force-feeding him.
This is a last ditch method for when your dog keeps spitting out the pill, no matter how you feed it to him. Therefore, do not attempt this method unless all else has failed.
First, coat the pill in a bit of butter to help it slide down more easily. Be very nice to your dog and approach her with a calm, friendly demeanor.
Dogs Remember Things
Remember, taking medicine can be traumatic for a dog, so try to reduce the trauma as much as possible! Do not restrain the dog any more than you have to, and certainly don’t yell at her if she spits out the pill.
Gently pry her jaw open from behind the canines and quickly throw the pill onto the back of her tongue.
Don’t hold her jaw shut. That will be unpleasant for the dog, and she may become more difficult in the future when you give her pills. If you put the pill far enough back, she won’t be able to spit it out, and she’ll have to swallow it.
Learning how to give your dog a pill or medicine is an important skill to learn and one trick might not work for all dogs. And, unfortunately, the same trick might work once or twice but not work after that.
Dogs are really smart and we sometimes have to be sneaky to fool them. But it’s all for their own good.