I received an email today from a concerned pet parent, Lizzie, who’s got two 5-month-old kittens in need of taking oral medication for deworming for the next week.
The issue? Pretty obvious as I’m sure you all could guess – even if you hadn’t read the title of this post: these cats really don’t want to take the medication. All this led to a battle of wits, where the human (as we often do) folded and looked for a better option.
The rejection of the medication may be due to the fact that the medicine tastes terrible, or it could be due to the fact that the medicine’s going down with a syringe, and that the whole syringe experience is probably not the most comfortable experience for the two kittens.
Either way, let me show you Lizzie’s email before we get into some tricks for making the pill go down easier for her two kittens (and yes, the “pill” pun was obviously intended):
I’m a new cat owner to two very sweet 5-month-old kittens, sister and brother. Although they are both incredibly loving, they HATE getting their oral meds via syringe (sulfadimethoxine for some worms… the lady who rescued them gave it to me and I have one more week to go).
Either they despise the taste of it, or I’m just awful at administering it. After a battle of sorts, I’ll give up but both kitties stay mad at me for the next couple of hours. It’s so sad!
Any tips for doing this effectively? Can I put the oral med in their food? Water?
Now, Lizzie, you’re definitely on the right track when it comes to thinking up alternate ways to get your kittens to take that medication without having to use a syringe.
There are a few issues with the two options you’ve listed, which I’ll go over first. One of the two is viable if you do it in a specific way, but I’ll get into that in detail.
Right after I discuss which techniques you’ll want to avoid using for getting a kitty to take medication, I’ll discuss a bunch of tricks you can use to get your cats to hopefully gobble up that medicine without the use of a syringe anyway.
Hopefully at least one of these will work out – painlessly – for all of you, and you won’t have any more hours waiting for kittens to stop being mad at you to worry about!
Techniques for Administering Medicine You Should Avoid
1. Don’t: Mix Medication Into a Cat’s Water
Putting medication into a cat’s water is a really bad idea. At least I would think so. It’s the option that’s least likely to get your cats to ingest medication, and it could cause your cats, sadly, to dehydrate as well.
Cats are notoriously bad at drinking water. Many cats actually need encouraging to drink as much as they should.
So any change of flavour of the water, such as in the form of yucky medication going into their water supply, has a good chance of getting your cat to hate drinking to the point where he or she will stop drinking entirely, causing worse problems.
Not only that, but cats don’t typically drink a whole lot of water at once, so it’s unlikely if your cat drinks medication mixed with water that he or she will get the right dose before he or she’s done drinking.
Essentially this one is a no-go. But the next suggestion you have, is a solid could-work, under specific conditions. Let’s get into those.
2. Don’t: Mix Medication Into Your Cat’s Regular Food
The issue with mixing medication into your cat’s food really comes down to the way you do it.
If you’re placing the medication into a cat’s regular food meal and expecting he or she to eat the whole lot, medicine included, you might end up with your cat refusing to eat the food entirely (if he or she can smell the medicine or taste it, and doesn’t like the smell or taste).
This is obviously no good, as you don’t want any cat to go on a food strike.
A food strike is a game your cat can win. Cats are often picky eaters, and will usually not conform to your wishes and finally “give up and eat” when they’re hungry.
Since they’re such picky eaters to begin with, altering the taste of their regular meal with medicine means you chance the entire meal going to waste.
Another bad alternative? Your cat might end up eating part of the food/medicine, but not ingesting the entire lot, and thus not getting all the medication he or she needs.
After a nibble or two, your cat might walk away from the meal dissatisfied with the taste, and you’ll never know how much medicine he or she actually consumed.
Or, if the medicine’s not mixed in evenly, you never know, your cat could eat around the medicine entirely. Cats are clever.
Unless…
The trick to making the mix of food and medicine work is masking the medicine into a snack, rather than a full fledged meal.
How you deal with this if you’re trying to use your cat’s regular food: take away the food for a few hours (if you open feed), wait until your cat is good and hungry, then play with your cat quite a bit until he or she is tired.
Finally, hand over just a bite of food, mixed in with the medication. And watch to make sure your kitty eats it all. If it all goes down no problems, do this again the next time. If your cat refuses to eat, try one of the alternate solutions I have.
I can see this working phenomenally well, and it’s what I’d recommend doing in most cases.
3. Don’t: Use Milk or Cheese to Get Your Cat to Ingest Medication
Some cats adore the taste of milk and/or cheese, and while cats are lactose intolerant, some cats can have quite a bit of it before they feel any of the effects.
Still, you shouldn’t ever give cats milk or cheese to mask medicine, because, as Dr. Tawnia Shaw, DVM pointed out in an interview with PetMD: “some medicines do not do well if taken with high calcium foods. Doxycycline, an antibiotic, for example, gets bound to the calcium and then does not get absorbed.”
Is it possible your particular medication is fine if it’s taken with milk or cheese? Yes – but I don’t think it’s ever worth the risk.
There are other snacks (some made for cats, some “human foods”) that are a lot better options if you really need to try something besides your cat’s main meal.
How to Easily Give Liquid or Solid Medicine to a Cat Using Snacks
1. Using Kitten Pate to Get Cats to Ingest Medicine
Now, you already have kittens so you likely are feeding them kitten pate to begin with, but if you’re not and you’re using kibble, try a teensy bit of kitten pate (a few licks worth, to make sure they eat all of it) with the medicine instead.
For those reading who have adult cats: I’d encourage you to try grabbing kitten pate to use as a snack to mask the taste of medicine.
Kitten pate is specially formulated to be ridiculously tasty to cats, and in my experience, all my adult cats go absolutely bananas for it.
It’s a lot harder to get a cat to eat medication-mixed-in-with-cat-food when your cat isn’t the most fond of that cat food, and kitten pates typically are irresistible, getting rid of that hurdle.
2. Pill Pockets for Getting Cats to Eat Medicine
Ah, pill pockets. Those tasty, kibble-lookalike products you can open up, pop a pill into, seal up, then hand over to your pet and watch as both you and your kitty get a treat at the same time.
If you’ve got quite a lot of medicine to be delving over, and don’t want any fuss or hassle, you just want to see that medication go down, pill pockets are where it’s at.
I can’t imagine a more convenient thing to have on hand for cats who take medication regularly.
3. Using a Wet Food to Get Cats to Eat Medication
You can use regular wet food to get cats to eat medication. Again, just make sure to give a very small amount with the medication, so it all goes down in a few licks.
If you have a cat who eats wet food already, and he or she just isn’t eating the food if the medications in it, you might want to get something like a salmon based wet food, as maybe the strong smell and taste will help cover up the smell and taste of the medicine.
4. Petroleum Jelly as a Snack to Get Cats to Ingest Medication
Okay this might be a weird one, but I’m going to list it anyway. I use petroleum jelly to prevent hairballs, and a few of my cats absolutely go crazy for the stuff.
I don’t use much, a blob the size of two pieces of kibble once a month to once a week if the cats are coughing a lot, and things all go down a lot easier that way.
I know if I had to, I could use petroleum jelly to mask medicine because of how much my cats like it.
It wouldn’t do a good job of masking bad tastes, however, so I do think there others are better alternatives. Especially if you don’t know if your cat likes petroleum jelly.
5. Using Peanut Butter to Get Cats to Eat Medicine
Some people have cats who absolutely love peanut butter and will eat it as a snack any chance they get.
If you know this to be true of your pet – and you know your pet has no allergies to peanuts (yes, cats can have allergies to peanuts, although it’s rare) – this is a great option for masking the taste of medicine so your cat will ingest it.
Just don’t give too much! You don’t want your cat over-eating this snack, or eating it in lieu of his or her main meal.
6. Use Another Well-Loved Snack to Get Cats to Eat Medicine
So long as it has no dairy and you know whatever’s on the menu is fine for a cat to eat – like cooked chicken, for instance – you can give a small bit of that mixed with medicine a go to see if your cat will eat the medication on his or her own happily.
I would definitely stay away from liquid snacks, and go for pastes or more solid alternatives, because sometimes cats can be fickle about drinking. But you know your cat best, so you’d know what he or she’d likely gobble up happily.
Just make sure it won’t conflict with the medication and make sure all you offer can easily be eaten in a few licks, so you don’t end up with a case of not-all-the-medicine being ingested as it should be.
(Edit 2024-09-05: Later down the line I actually ended up in this situation myself, and this particular trick worked for me to get my cat to take a very bitter pill that he refused to take any other way. Good luck to all of you out there in the same position, and I hope some of my advice proves helpful!)
Your Thoughts on Giving Medicine to Cats?
Have you ever had to give medicine to cats before? How did you do it? Would you do it differently in the future?
Do you have any advice for Lizzie or anyone else who’s in the same boat, or a similar one, as her?
Do you have any stories to share about cats accepting or refusing to take medication? Do you have any solutions up your sleeve that weren’t listed here?
Love to hear your thoughts and experiences on the topic in the comments down below!
I have to give Tapazole chewables to my 14 year old cat which she won’t eat. I have succeeded by breaking the tablets into small pieces and mixing the pieces with Friskies wet food that has lots of gravy. It works!
Gravy is very smart to have used!
I just started giving my cat Tapazole chewables which she won’t chew. So i broke the tablets up into very small pieces and mixed it with Friskies Shreds which have a lot of gravy and she cleans it right up. That’s not her normal food so I hope she doesn’t get used to it. It’s only for one week.
This is super smart. Glad the Shreds worked for getting those tablets into her system!
I hope she doesn’t either. Sometimes cats can become obsessed with new foods, but if you need to bring her back to her old food and she’s refusing, just mix higher and higher percentage of her old food in with the new one. I think she’ll be okay to switch back, though.
I feed a Grey feral cat, and he has some skin issues from fighting or something. It appeared suddenly ( a few day passed), but I can tell he has an infection because of his sleepy behavior. I still can’t touch him, so it has to be in his food. What I’ve learned from this site is to expect loosing a few doses before finding a way. I intend to try all the suggestions, one by one, and hopefully one of them will work out. My last option is to try to trap him … and take him to the vet. Crazy becoming so attached to a wild cat, but, well, he’s shy, timid, and he has the most beautiful emerald green eyes that look like jewels. Tks everyone for the help/suggestions!
What about mixing dewormer with tuna? Would that be ok since it’s only once a year? I have 5 cats and everyone of them are impossible to give medicine to. I’ve had cats for 30 years. This bunch is the worst to give meds to. Thanks
My cat has LPS, an autoimmune disease. The inside of his mouth and his gums swell up really bad and it looks like he has strep throat or something. It’s terrible. I have to give him liquid pain medicine two times a day. He might take it in gravy one day, tuna broth the next, then just nothing! So I have to resort to squirting it into the back of his throat. We both hate that.
I have to pill my cat for 40 days for a parasite infection that is affecting his blood cells. I am on day 7. I have tried hiding it inside a treat, tried hiding it inside a dab of wet food, tried hiding it in forte flora powder, Pill pockets, and so on. Everything worked once after a few tries of him spitting it out but now all efforts to hide the pill is futile. He is impossible to hold down even with my husband’s help to get it in his mouth….I used to be able to pill him that way till a vet prescribed clavamox and caused a severe stomach issue which resulted in an ER visit and since then he fights like a ninja so.can not hold him.down even in a burrito towel wrap. I have tried liquid compounded at the pharmacy and he wouldn’t take that either….tried mixing it a dab of food and he smells the food and won’t eat it. Don’t know what else to try….he KNOWS as soon as he sniffs it and won’t even try to eat the treat or food it is in.
I have a cat that I need to give a couple of pills to. At first she was fine with the pills mixed in with a teaspoonful of wet food and when she finished that , I gave her the rest of the food. But she stopped wanting to eat the first bit, so on another website, it said to try yogurt. I ground up the pills with a mortar and pestle, put on a plate, then used about 1/2 to 3/4 tspful of plain, unflavored, yogurt, and mixed the powder into the yogurt. I didn’t notice any intextinal issues, and she liked the yogurt, but still had to watch carefully to make sure she ate most of it before I gave her the rest of the food.
On this website, I saw about using the meat paste. I looked for that, but couldn’t find it so I tried using a meat variety of baby food. It comes in ham, beef, turkey, and chicken. I use about 3/4 tspful of the baby food, an equal amount of water and the ground up pills and mix up with a spoon. She licks up that paste quickly and then I give her the rest of her food. If necessary, I distract my other cats by putting a dab of the baby food across the room for them, or get them to come to another room while she eats the paste.
Then they all happily dig into their regular food.
I need to give my cat pain relief medication that she is not supposed to swallow – it’s meant to go on her gums and under her tongue, but is in a syringe and I’m really not managing this well – she ends up swallowing most of it (the vet has said that this won’t harm her, but the medication won’t do its job). Any tips would be very much appreciated as I find it hard just to open her mouth to get the syringe anywhere near her…
There is a plastic finger tip “tooth brush” designed brush/massage cat’s gums to prevent dental disease. Ask you vet if you can put the med on the “tooth brush” and massage in gently. You do have to get the cat’s mouth open, but I think there would be less swallowing.
I just wanted to say thank you! I’m about to go out of town and my cat needs liquid medicine. . .I was getting really worried, because I can’t ask my mom (who is not a cat person) to catch Oscar and use a syringe to give him medicine. . .he doesn’t like to be held to begin with. Anyway, the pate with medicine works beautifully and my mom can manage that with no problem! Thanks again!
I never knew cats liked petroleum jelly! I must give that a go. We had to give our Ragdoll a pill once a day for 5 years in total so we became experts but it always needed two of us to do it. I would hold him in a cradle and my husband would open his jaw, through the pill into the back of his mouth and then massage his throat to stimulate him to swallow and that would work every time. These options are much better, especially if there is only one of you to do the job.
I’ve discovered meat tubes/meat purée tubes! Cut it open a bit, mix up the powder in there and boom- my kitty Piper goes wild (and crossed eyed) for it! So far there has not been a medicine that was not sufficiently disguised in them 🙂
Thank you, Anita! I am very happy to be able to help kitten´s moms.
I have a 12 year old cat who has to take a liquid medication for hypothyroidism. She is smart and very stubborn. I have tried to give it to her in her wet food but she absolutely refuses to eat it. I have to eat it. I have tried putting it in her kibble with a tuna puree mixed in. She still refuses. I don’t know what else to do.
Have you tried the pill pockets? Those should work out if nothing else does. Give them a shot and let me know how that goes. If they don’t work I can try to come up with some other ideas.
I thought pill pockets were just for pills. But I just tried the salmon pate and it worked beautifully! She gobbled it up with no hesitation!
These are great suggestions! Luckily, we haven’t had to give medicine to any of our kittens yet (we have five, all two or younger), but do you have any tips for clipping claws? We’re at our wits end!
Thanks!
Would also love advice for clipping claws!
Done and done! Here’s the post.
I discovered that I can mix petroleum jelly with the few drops of medicine but my cat doesn’t like any and won’t eat it but I take the small amount of jelly plus the medicine drops and I place the jelly mix on one of his leg’s fur. My cat starts licking it from his fur as he is so tidy and always washes himself to be clean. He swallows the medicine that way. I know, it’s not very nice what I do to him but it is better than forcing him to swallow the medicine with a syringe. He gets annoyed at me for a short while and then he forgives me.
Well, aren’t you clever! This is such a brilliant solution.
Sometimes I put a single piece of kibble on top of the petroleum jelly to mask taste, but that’s for the cats who aren’t too motivated by just petroleum jelly.
This, however, is a solution I would never have thought of and (on those super-clean types of cats) will certainly need to try!
Thank you, Elise. I am very happy that you like my idea. I am always happy if I can help people who love cats. You have made my day. Please, let me know if you ever try this trick and how it results.
Brilliant!