Giving cat a tablet or liquid from syringe

[purpleme12]

Please can anyone give me stories of how they give their cat a tablet?
Or even liquid through syringe straight into their mouth (when they don't open their mouth)
As many ideas as possible are welcome

With great difficulty. And it depends on the cat. One of my cats will take liquid as she knows she will be rewarded with treats. Usually I grind tablets into a powder and mix with a little Whiskas milk or sardine juice and syringe that in as she does better with that. Other times I just use water.

My male cat has to be wrapped in a towel by one person, and the liquid syringed into his mouth before stroking his throat to ensure he swallows it (same method can be used with a small tablet).

My vet also suggested mixing the liquid with butter. You can also get a little syringe-style device that pops a tablet into their mouths - never worked with mine. I also bought treats on Amazon you could hide a treat inside - again, never worked with mine but worked with one feral I had to medicate.

Good luck!

Oh and my male cat won’t open his mouth either - I use the technique suggested here to ‘encourage’ him to open it. www.wikihow.com/Open-a-Cat%27s-Mouth

I recommend owning my exact cat who is a wimp about taking pills. You sit on the floor behind him, open his mouth, throw a pill in and then hold his mouth closed till you feel him swallow. He's also the only cat that the vet will do a blood test on without an extra pair of hands, so he tells me. He sits there purring like a tractor while needles are stuck into him.

I had a cat years ago who even the vet couldn't get pills into.

How do you cope with the " rabid dog" impersonation that my cat can do if he has something he doesn't like the taste of in his mouth?

One of my cats I tell him the pill is not for him, turn my back and he eats it

Liquid food I squirt on to wet food and they will eat it

My other cat sits on the worktop with his back towards me, I kind of hug him into me so he backs into my body and then sick my fingers in the corner of his mouth and then chuck the tablet in while he growls at me -always forgives me though

Our vet gave us ‘easy pill’ - you wrap the pill inside a pea size amount. has the texture of fudge. The cats think it is delicious and eat it from our hand. www.animeddirect.co.uk/easypill-cat-putty?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI8M7_z-iQ9QIVAevtCh3bDAZEEAAYASAAEgIOCPD_BwE

I crush the tablet up and mix it in a lick-e-lix yogurt.

I crush the tablet to powder and mix it with wet food which she doesn’t get often so gobbles up.

Can’t imagine getting a syringe in.

Thank you for all suggestions
I have tried to encourage opening mouth as mentioned above but it didn't work so don't know if I'm doing it wrong
Any more suggestions always welcome too

Do you think it's easier with a tablet or liquid in syringe?

The only medicine I’ve ever been able to administer was a liquid, and only to a very small & not too fighty cat. DH would hold her, with all 4 legs trapped, and I could get the syringe into the corner of her mouth and squirt.

It was metacam, for pain relief after tooth extraction - a fairly thick suspension iirc. The dose was very small.

(I always get the vet to give the worming pills. She can’t do it unassisted by hand either, needs me to hold the cat while she uses one of those plastic things. I find that reassuring )

(Plastic thing is like this)

Ok so if I can open my cat's mouth
I could just syringe it in?

Either way you will get shredded. I had to give my big old ex feral thyroid pills every day for years.
My diary entry entry for one of those days was:
I wake up.
I look at the cat, the cat looks at me.
She knows what's coming.
The chase ensues.
I am late for work.
The end.

I'm so lucky that the cat that needs daily medicine in this house is so compliant - he jumps up to where he needs to be and just sits there - he even opens his mouth on command

For difficult cats, you need to trap them in a towel or blanket so they can't fight you - this is often a two-man job. One person wraps the cat up in a "purrito" style so all their paws are tucked away. Then, to open the mouth, close your thumb and index finger together, put them in the corner of the cats mouth and push the mouth open. Then, with the other hand, put the pill or syringe in and hold the mouth shut. Rub the cats throat to make sure they swallow, then release cat and run

I was responsible for giving one of ours his antibiotic tablet yesterday. Normally it is broken in half and given with some cat biscuits and, being a gannet, he gobbles it up without noticing.

Not yesterday though. They have metal bowls and halfway through their dinner, while I was monitoring the situation to make sure they didn't all swap bowls, there was a sharp ting noise as he spat the thing out. At the end, every biscuit gone, but two small half-tablets remained. I solved the problem by dissolving them in the juice from a tin of sardines.

One of my cats is an absolute angel, she needs pills twice a day. I put her on a windowsill that’s at waist height, backed into the corner, open her mouth and chuck it as far back as I can. She used to be a nightmare, she got wise to any efforts to hide the pill in lick-e-lix, pill paste or pill pockets so we just had to find a way of giving them and she just accepts it now. We always do it before food so she’s learnt no pill means no food!

We always used to say it was a good job it was the placid cat that needs pilling not the bonkers one…then last week the bonkers one started vomiting and now needs antacids twice a day. We do the same windowsill method but she yowls and scratches and fights so we are hoping she’ll start to also realise no pill means no food in the next few days 🤞🤞🤞

When it comes to spot on wormer however they are both feral nightmares so you can’t have it all I guess!

I use those meaty stick things you can get at all supermarkets... squidge it round the tablet and in it goes! Handy really as my old boy had to have three tablets a day towards the end with a squirt of pain goo into his food in the morning!

We carve pockets into the Felix or dreamie treats and lodge the tablet in them, or if the tablet is small enough we'll pop it inside one of the Felix tube treats. It's a bit of a faff at first carving them out, but we've got the knack of it now, and it means our cat doesn't know she's taking them so it's a completely stress-free process for us and her! You can buy pill pocket treats but we have a fussy eater and she's never gone for them. Good luck 😊

My little cat is on round three of antibiotics with an anal gland infection (yak).

I battled through the first course until I realised if you crush the tablet between two spoons and then mix with a teaspoon of lik-e-lix she licks it up in about 4 seconds flat!!

Definitely get the lik-e-lix

For tablets, try pill pockets.

For liquid syringe, wrap cat in a towel and hold around neck. Slide syringe into check. Plunge. It’s how my vet taught me to do it. After a while, my cat stopped needing the towel, but I think it’s because she liked the pain killers I was giving her. Addiction is not a joke, but it was really, really easy to joke about how much she loved her pain meds.

@Blossom64265

For tablets, try pill pockets.

For liquid syringe, wrap cat in a towel and hold around neck. Slide syringe into check. Plunge. It’s how my vet taught me to do it. After a while, my cat stopped needing the towel, but I think it’s because she liked the pain killers I was giving her. Addiction is not a joke, but it was really, really easy to joke about how much she loved her pain meds.

But how did you get the cat to open her mouth?

I'm having to give 2 steroid tablets a day.
A bit if chicken wrapped round the tablet works best for our cat or webi lix.
In the past she has been terrible and we had tried the syringe but it all ended in a fight
She is very hungry atm and is crying for food and gets exited when we go to the fridge for her bit of chicken

@bruffin

I'm having to give 2 steroid tablets a day. A bit if chicken wrapped round the tablet works best for our cat or webi lix. In the past she has been terrible and we had tried the syringe but it all ended in a fight She is very hungry atm and is crying for food and gets exited when we go to the fridge for her bit of chicken

So you wrap the tablet in chicken? And she doesn't just leave the tablet??

No, it's got to be well wrapped but small enough for her to eat in one go.
It's 2 weeks now and working well , fingers crossed.

Oh right so a small piece