giving meds

[catslave16]

I just got my next-door neighbour to hold Rufus Tuftypaws firmly while I forced his mouth open, shoved a Comfortis pill down his throat, closed his mouth and gently stroked his throat until he swallowed, and now he won't look at me and won't eat the treat he usually gobbles up, and I feel like a ba-a-a-ad person!.... and he'll never, ever, forgive me (well, not for the next ten minutes anyway) and in a month we'll have to do it all over again

[MarySkater]

I once minded a friend's cat while she was away. He was on meds, so I had to go through the same routine once a day, and had no one to hold him. One time, he fooled me into thinking he had swallowed the pill (fortunately they were quite small) but when I let him go, he spat it out. As it rolled away over the floor, he chased it, picked it up and ate it...

[Crewella]

I had to laugh at that - typical cat!!

I hate giving meds, but always do opt for the 'down the hatch' method, even when given the option of AB injections I'll always opt for pills. I have found that they do get used to the routine and forgive you, but it is harder when it's something like a worming tablet that only happens once every couple of months. Cats have a huge capacity to make you feel like a dreadful mum!!

[meriad]

the thing with Comfortis though is that it is just such a huge pill.... my brother used to cut it into 1/4 to give to their cat

[Lilith]

Aww Catslave, they can't half guilt you when you have to do something like that! Are they really still prescribing massive pills for a cat's tiny throat ? Crazy! Like expecting a human to swallow a golf ball! But cats will guilt you anyway - just now my 15 year old Emily jumped up beside me and missed:- 'You pushed me down!'

'Emmy, would I do a thing like that?'

'Not sure...you trimmed that long claw on my left paw yesterday. That claw was USEFUL, I used it as a grappling tool!'

Fusses and apologies...

Lol Mary that is just typical of cats! Do you think she thought it was a spider? Crunch it up fast before it escapes! I once used to take yeast pills (vitamin B, supposed to be good for the female system) and a very cheeky cat known as The Leopard pounced on one and swallowed it...it was the size of an aspirin!

Hi, Crewella, I'm afraid I'm a coward when it comes to 'pilling'. I CAN - I got nearly as expert as my then vet, who used to toss the pill to the back of the cat's throat - and knock it down the gullet with the butt of his ballpoint No I didn't go as far as THAT, but I wasn't bad, though I say it myself, but nowadays I'll crush a pill up and hide it in a little spoonful of tuna or fishy Encore. Sprinkle capsules are a wonderful thing. But yes, if I had to I'd pill in preference to an injection. Only my very large Siamese cross George had the strength to out-struggle me, but I had a brainwave one day and sat him in an old wire supermarket basket so that he couldn't back away from the pill.

He took it like a man.

Hope Rufus has forgiven you now, Catslave; he'll get used to the routine, bless him

[catslave16]

Thank you, thank you, I've been forgiven...
This is what Terry Pratchett had to say in The Unadulterated Cat:
"However healthy the cat, there will come a time when it needs a Pill. Oh, how we nod and look like respectable, concerned cat owners as the vet hands us the little pack [....] And once we were all innocent and thought, the cat food smells like something off the bottom off a pond anyway. Real cat can't possibly notice if we crumble the damn things up a bit and mix them in... [....] As we get wiser, of course, we notice that Real cat has taste buds that make the most complex computer-driven sensory apparatus look like a man with a cold. It can spot an alien molecule a mile off. [....]
Next comes the realist phase ('after all, from a purely geometric point of view a cat is only a tube with a door at the top'). You take the pill in one hand and the cat in the other...
Er...
You take the pill in one hand and in the other you take a large kitchen towel with one angry cat head poking out of the end of it. With your third hand you prize open the tiny jaws, insert the pill, clamp the jaws shut and, with your fourth hand, tickle the throat until a small gulping noise indicates that the pill has gone down.
You wish.
It hasn't gone down. Because it's just gone sideways. Real cats have a secret poich in their cheeks for this sort of thing. A Real cat can take a pill, eat a meal, and then spit out the slightly damp pill with a noise which, if this was a comic strip, would probably be represented as ptooie.
It is important to avoid the third stage, which basically consists of Man, Beast and Medicine locked in dynamic struggle [....]
The fourth stage is up to you [...] A fellow Real cat owner says powdering the wretched object - the pill, not the cat, although by stage four you'll entertain any idea - mixing it with a little butter and smearing it on a paw is a sure-fire method, because the cat's ancient instinct is to lick itself clean. [....] Our view is that an animal that will starve and asphyxiate before taking its medicine won't have any trouble with a grubby paw."
(I've edited this down a bit for brevity's sake)
Thus spake a real cat owner. I've read this book many many times and it still makes me laugh out loud.

[MarySkater]

Another take on the subject here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC372253/

[alanc]

All this talk reminds me of the terrible time I had trying to pill Tilly at New Year! Attempts at the direct down the hatch method were less than 50% successful - holding a yard of wriggling Maine Coon with legs everywhere, trying to open her powerful jaws while trying to push a pill in with the same hand was a nightmare. Even when I got the pill in her mouth she usually managed to hide it in her big mouth and spit it out later. In spite of Terry Pratchett's disbelief, crushing the pill and smearing it over her chest was a quite successful technique. As it said in "How to live with a Calculating Cat" (from which I got the idea), the only way to play the game is to cheat!

[catslave16]

Thank you, MarySkater, and alanc, that's got to be worth a try. I'll have to check out How to Live with a Calculating Cat

[Lilith]

Hey Catslave, however did I miss out on the Terry Pratchett cat book? In the years after it came out I was working in a bookshop and responsible for ordering stock for the pet section

My friend Mr Amazon is now sending me a secondhand copy

[Crewella]

I somehow missed Terry Pratchett's cat book too - that is soon to be fixed! Thank you!

[Ruth B]

My family had cats since i was about 6 years old and I was always the one to help with defleaing and medications, I developed a bit of a knack at it, to the extent that allegedly, after I had moved away from home, one of the vet my parent used actually said he wished I was still there. I can also remember a time when a friend asked me to deworm her cat, she got the cat, and the tablet, then went to find the 'essential towel' leaving me with a cat that was starting to look bored and the tablet, I looked at the cat waiting on the side, and the tablet already out of its packet and thought sod waiting, got the cat under one arm and popped the tablet in. When my friend returned with the towel she seem astounded that I had done it with out wrapping the cat up.

As you can see I considered myself good at giving a cat a tablet, so there had to be one cat that proved me wrong. We had a Ragdoll we had from a rescue centre, he was healthy for many years then had to have his teeth scaled and some removed. The vet provided antibiotics and pain meds, he even gave us a sringe so that if we had problems we could crush the tablet and give it in water. Ragdolls have incredibly silky fur, I could not hold him still, my partner could not hold his feet down to stop him pawing at me, he seemed able to slip out of anything, for the next few days tablets and medicine went everywhere except down the cat, I frequently ended up trying to wash bright pink tablet solution of myself just before going to work. When he went for his check up I admitted that he had probably had less than half his antibiotics as we had given up as it was stressing all three of us out, the vet understood and said that the gums were healing nicely anyway. A few weeks later the other side of his mouth was still giving problems even having been scaled, so he was back in to have the rest of the back teeth out, this time I asked if the vet could give him a long lasting antibiotic injection before he came home.

[catslave16]

Thank you for your stories! As for the Terry Pratchett book,it was published in 1989, and it's illustrated by Gray Jolliffe whose cats always have big noses for some reason , but he captures their attitudes excellently and humorously. I think the book has been rather overshadowed by the Discworld books. I found it 16 years ago at a Discworld convention in a field in deepest Suffolk. My son came with me. Terry was there. I told him there aren't many books that a mother and 14-year old son fight over as to who gets to read it first! He signed my Death trilogy (Death being my favourite character - a cat lover of course!) and wrote "Read it and reap". Terry died last March, with a drink in his hand and a cat on his lap. A good way to go. Are you guys aware of The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, set in the Discworld and featuring another great cat character?