Back in May my 12 year old cat was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism (not an uncommon condition in senior cats from what I understand). The vet prescribed Felimazole twice a day for him. The most common form of this medication is a small pill.
Thankfully, getting him to take the pills wasn’t too difficult, at least at first. The trick of hiding it in some sort of treat works on him… for a while. The problem is that whatever treat I hide it in only works for maybe a few months at most. Then he starts refusing to eat the treat. Then I switch to a different treat, and that works for a while, until it doesn’t. And obviously and some point I’m going to run out of treats to hide his pills in that he’ll still eat. I’m not sure if he’s getting tired of that particular treat, or if he’s figuring out that it’s got medicine hidden in it, but I suspect the latter.
So far I’ve tried:
I started with chicken flavored pill pockets. Those worked at first, particularly when I put it in with his food. But then he stopped eating them. He would literally eat every morsel of food in his dish except the pill pocket.
Then I switched to hiding them in a ball of cheese. He loved them at first, but like the pill pockets before he eventually started refusing to eat them.
Then I got the idea of trying salmon flavored pill pockets. That went pretty much the same as before. He loved them at first, then one day it’s like a switch flipped in him and he just decided he wouldn’t eat them anymore.
After some Googling I got the idea of crushing a cat treat and rolling the pill pocket in the crumbs, basically making a cat treat “breading” on the pill pocket. That made even the old chicken pill pockets enticing enough to him that he would immediately gobble them up when I gave them to him… until this morning. Last night he happily ate ate the pill pocket and his medicine. This morning he just started at it as if to say “No, I don’t want those anymore.”
Luckily, I had a new bag of treats on hand. So I opened the new bag, crushed one of those treats, and rolled the pill pocket in that, and then he ate it right up. I don’t know if that it was a new, fresh treat as opposed to the other ones that might have been getting a bit stale, or that it was a different flavor (salmon instead of tuna). But that at least got him to take his medicine again. But I have to assume that’s only going to work for so long, and then he’s going to start refusing them, too.
So, any tips on how to keep getting him to take them?
Well, Cats are notorious for loving a treat or food and changing their mind almost mid-chew.
I boil chicken livers for my cat, dog(sometimes little grandsons) treats. Plain. Nothing added.
The animals adore them.
Try chicken liver.
ETA: obviously your cat is not adverse to the medicine so much as the chosen treat.
I don’t think you’ll ever run out of commercial choices. New ones come out every week. Seems like.
You could rotate treats as well.
I give my cat pills by putting her in my lap sort of like you’d hold a baby in your lap, with the back of her head in the crook of my left arm. Then with my left hand, gently hold her head around her upper jaw and tip her head back, which opens her mouth. Then when her mouth is all the way open I drop the pill to the back of her throat and she swallows it.
If you run out of good choices, maybe a compounding pharmacy? Get the pill into a liquid suspension and either squirt it down his throat or try mixing with food.
We have found a yogurt-based cat treat called ‘lick-e-licks’ (by Webbox) that our elderly cat loves.
The pills get ground into powder and mixed with the paste, and in it goes.
Might not work for all medications: some may have a strong taste that it won’t mask, but works for what she needs at the moment.
Don’t know if these are available outside the UK, but there may be similar things elsewhere?
This is the way I get Caelan to take his meds. Grind the pill into powder, mix it with gravy from the cat fud can, suck it up in the syringe and squirt it down his throat. When he fights me on that I smear it all over the top of his front paws. He’ll spend 20 minutes licking it off, but it gets the job done.
Variety is key. And timing helps too. When we gave our cat his pill at dinnertime, he would often refuse it. But when we give it to him first thing in the morning, he’ll eat it without trouble. It has to be hidden in liver or a paste of wet food and his favorite treats; here’s the brand he likes best: Cat Calming Dual Textured Chews Chicken Flavor (2-Pack) | Pet Honesty
Be really careful about grinding up thyroid meds. This is one of the rare things that humans are more sensitive to than cats are – and it’s absorbed through the skin. I screwed up my own thyroid levels (temporarily) handling split thyroid pills, never mind ground ones. You’re not really, if you read the small print, supposed to handle even entire pills barehanded.
I put the cat on a chair or other surface facing away from me so backwards retreat is blocked by my body; tip cat’s head back with one hand from the front while prying mouth open at back corners; pick up the tiny little slippery pill carefully with tweezers (which both keeps me from touching it, and keeps the cat from biting my fingers as they don’t go into the mouth), and drop the pill in. With the current hyperthyroid cat that works quite well. I had one a few years ago for whom I needed to have handy not only the pill and tweezers, but also an eyedropper full of water, which I squirted in on top of the pill to make her swallow; otherwise she’d hide it in her cheek and spit it out later. But the current one swallows without that.
Give the cat a treat afterwards; that may make it easier to catch them the next time.
We used this on our cat for about two years. You need to use gloves to apply it, but it’s super easy to do. Twice a day, and alternate ears (right at night made it easy to remember). Our cat sitter had no issues with it when we were away. Small downside is having to clean out the ears out with a damp tissue a few times a week to clean out some build up inside the ear, mostly on the fur on the inside.
This is what I did with my old cat Hector. He could smell or taste the ground-up pill in almost everything, but I found one flavor of cat food that worked. Dinner time was a small bit of that food with the ground-up pill in it, and then some other food for his main course once that bit was gone.
If it is something you can afford, consider I-131 treatment. Basically the cat is given an injection of radioactive iodine (the 131 isotope). The iodine is concentrated in the thyroid gland, destroying it. No more medicating (in most cases).
The transdermal medications are designed to absorb and have therapeutic level in the blood stream fairly quickly within an hour or so. I would prevent the other cat from licking for at least 2 hours but ideally they won’t lick at all. Just to be safe. Obviously to much licking of the ears can result in unwanted lowering of thyroid levels in the healthy cat
This. I had to pill our cat for 16 years – one pill in the morning and two at night. If you got it into the back of his throat, he’d take it. He never gave me much trouble other than trying to spit it out.
For my wife, he’d squirm and try to get away. I think it was how he looked at us: I was the mother cat and my wife was a playmate cat to him. He treated her differently from me in other respects.