Giving medicine to your dog

Giving medicine to your dog – either through dog pills, tablets like Sentinel or even liquid medicine – can be a chore at times. In fact, giving some of my past dogs medicine used to be horrible.

I have tried a lot of different methods, and have found that working your way down a checklist eventually gets the job done. I too have German Shepherds, so getting them to eat things usually isn’t much of a problem.

In the past, I started by just offering him the pill. This was hit-or-miss, since they would sometimes just eat it, but would just as often spit it out. The next thing I would try would be just dropping the pill into their food or spreading the liquid medicine over the food.

For most pills, this works well, but for liquids it sometimes led to them to just ignoring their food. Because of this, I would never try adding it to my dog’s water, since it will most likely just lead to them ignoring the water and your wasting a dose of medicine.

Overall however, I believe I have found the perfect way of giving medicine to your dog (mine too) and now it is not a problem with any of them. When I have to give my dogs a pill, I try to disguise it in food.

Other people have told me to try and jam it down their throats and then hold their mouth shut, but that never worked for me. I have found that the best way to get them to swallow the pill and not spit it out is to get a piece of cheese and tear it in half. Then I spread a little bit of peanut butter on one half and place the pill in the peanut butter.

Then I use the other half of the cheese to make a sort of peanut butter cheese sandwich. My dogs eat it right up and don't even notice the medicine! It works great. They can't taste the medicine because of the peanut butter and because the pill is stuck on cheese, they can't spit it out as easily.

And if I'm out of cheese for some reason, I just use a little more peanut butter. I'll never go back to my old methods. This is the best way of giving medicine to your dog. Now if I could only find a way to give a cat a pill and not end up with stitches it would be perfect.

So, the checklist I spoke to you about earlier is as follows:

1. Put pills in his food, try giving liquids directly.

2. If it’s a pill, wrap the pill in cheese (Some dogs do better with cheese than others!)

3. If it’s a liquid, add it to wet food, or to canned pumpkin if your dog doesn’t react well to wet foods.

4. Coat the pill in peanut butter and freeze. This works well for large dogs, but smaller dogs may just eat the coating.

Hopefully one of these methods works for you and your own dog!

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"Dogs are obsessed with being happy." -- James Thurber