As long as we’re feeding zombie dogs… My sister freezes the tablet in butter. The result is a little slippery “butter pill” that the dog still doesn’t like, but can be made to swallow.
(She tasted a little of the med, and said it tasted absolutely hideous!)
A slurry in a syringe is probably the lowest-fuss method. You want two syringes, one with your med slurry and one of plain water to wash down any bits stuck to the tongue (and to rinse off the godawful taste.) Grab the snout as if to pill, wedge the syringe into the corner of the mouth pointing as far back as you can easily get it, and slowly, steadily press the plunger. You don’t want to just trickle it in; the taste will hit them and it’ll get really hard to hang on. You don’t want to blast it in, because that tends to make them gag and the larger volume makes it easier to spit out.
You can also mix a little Jello in the slurry to help cover the taste. That’s what we always did with the horses at the mixed practice I worked at ages ago. (Trying to pill a horse is impractical on a lot of fronts, so all oral meds got the slurry routine, and when you’re trying to do something to a horse on your own, the horse’s cooperation is pretty important so you want to jolly them along when at all possible.) Cherry seemed to work best, or maybe the patients we had on the days we had cherry were just better natured and more cooperative anyway.
One word of warning about the Jello thing, though. You CANNOT make up extra syringes for later treatments if you’re using enough Jello to make it not completely awful. That shit will set up like a brick and you’ll never get it squirted out of that syringe.
How much powder in a dose? My dogs can’t resist braunschweiger… Try making a ball of it, poke in an indentation and add the med, then cover it up, sealing the powder inside. If there’s a lot of powder to hide, this might not work.
ETA: I’ll stand by my advice, but not for zombie dogs.
My sister tried secreting the med in a ball of yummy stuff – meat, cheese, all sorts of things – but the nasty taste apparently is so pervasive, the dog learned not to trust offerings of goodies. One problem is that dogs like to chew their food, so eventually they hit that pocket of nasty. Blending it in and mixing it all up also seems not to work too well: the nasty flavor gets in all the meat.
A Nobel prize for the chemist who can make this stuff tasty!
To get my dog to take tylosin (Tylan) powder, I put in on 1/2 a slice of soft white bread, then fold the bread up and squish it together in my hand to form a compact clump. My dog has never refused that. You must use soft, fresh bread. If it’s dry, the bread will not clump together well and the powder will leak out. You may be able to use a smaller piece of bread if your dosage is smaller than the one I use (1/4 teaspoon). My dog also has to take a thyroid pill, so I put that on the bread with the tylosin. Works every time.
Tell the dog it’s actually tylosin phosphate?
Serious answer: go the the pharmacy and pick up some empty gel-caps. Fill them with the powder and administer as you would any other capsule.
We used sliced open hotdogs for my late dog’s daily pill, and yeah, if you tease enough they don’t even chew well enough to notice there’s a pill.
This is basically how we got pills into dolphins. Stick a pill into a fish and feed it to the dolphin – but they quickly learn how to tell when a fish has a pill in it, and they won’t eat it.
So we held out two fish, and fed them the first one with the pill, and immediately the second one without a pill. Then they would gulp down the first one, to get the second one. (And you probably thought dolphins were smart, didn’t you?)
(ETA: The pills were just several kinds of vitamin pills. Captive marine mammals supposedly might not get all the vitamins they need through the monotonous diet they get fed, so they get vitamin supplements.)
We were advised to give a daily amount of Tylosin powder to our little dog, 6 pounds and 14 years old; until the jar was empty.
I tried a few methods at first. Mainly trying to tuck some of the powder inside a morself of food. Two problems with this: Once she detects the taste by swallowing that food (rice ball or whatever), she runs away because of the horrible taste. And, while I am trying to prepare that morsel of food, some of the powder taste contaminates my fingers and the rest of the food; so she knows it is coming.
After struggling with this for a week or two, I spoke with some veterinary staff who explained it as follows … the powder is meant to be spread, or diluted, across an entire serving of food. They believe that once it is dissolved and spread over a volume, then the taste will be in the background and not intense.
I did not think that would work very well, i.e. the dog is still not going to accept the taste. But I came up with a variation on the technique, and it worked for us:
Not a perfect solution, but it got us through about a month of Tylosin powder. The only other thing I was thinking about trying was to obtain something compounded (chewable) through the Wedgewood compounding pharmacy. But in our case, I prefer to do the dumpling soup.
Larry