How to get a cat to take pills

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I have a 15 year old puss who has been prescribed medication as he has a heart problem. He has to have one pill in the morning and another tiny one in the evening. We've tried hiding the pill in cheese and bought some of the putty stuff to wrap around it (think they're called 'Easy Pills something) but it's such a trial getting him to swallow them! Any ideas how to get pills into a reluctant cat? He's on this medication for life now.

I had this issue with giving my 10 year old boy a 6 week course of antibiotics (2 tablets a day). Hiding the tablet in food didn’t work - he just ate around it or spat it out!

Unfortunately I had to bite-the-bullet and put it in his mouth every time.
I’d kneel behind him with his body between my legs, cup his face, gently push my index finger between his teeth and gently pull his jaw open just enough to slip the tablet to the back of his tongue and then put my hand gently around his muzzle, holding his head back and stroking his neck to get him to swallow.
After a while we both got used to it and it became easier. There are YouTube videos but some are more helpful than others!

Hope this helps! At least he doesn’t have diabetes where you have to inject him every day! 😭

Exactly this. You'll work out your method over time and eventually he will just accept the inevitable.

The only issue we came up against is holidays - you can't expect a neighbour to do this, and not all catteries / cat-sitters will administer meds to an unwilling cat.

I feel your pain! We've just had to give our cat a two week course of antibiotics. I hid it in food, but it often took many attempts. He'd eat around it, then I'd put it in something else and he'd eat around that. Eventually, he ate most of it but I don't think he got the full course.
Next time, I'm using one of these: amzn.eu/d/aA5bvYg . I think it's the best way. We managed to give my cat the painkillers by holding him in a towel, gently opening his mouth and firing the medicine to the back of his throat. We got used to it in the end, so I plan to do the same with pills in the future. It's a couple of seconds of distress but at least you know they're getting the full pill.

The alternative is to crush the pill in a pestle and mortar and disguise it in the food. I've done this with mine and mixed some tuna to the food or some licky lix just to make it more tasty

I did this too but my cat still ate around it. The problem is many pills taste particularly bitter when you crush them. They taste ok whole but not crushed. The pills you had may have been OK but most are bitter.

If they’re ones you can crush, I recommend mixing with the Feliway cat frube type things. That’s the only thing I found to work!

I had to dose two of our cats on a daily basis.

I would kneel on the floor with the cat between my knees. I crossed my ankles so they couldn't back out under me. I gently turned his or her face up so their nose pointed to the ceiling. A cat has trouble keeping its mouth shut in that position. Then I would quickly shove the pill past the arch of their tongue so it would go down their throat. Fortunately they were gentle cats and didn't scratch my inner thighs to ribbons.

We use lick e lix! Cover the pill in a bit of it and feed it to the cat from our finger. Works every time!

We use Lick-e-lix too. Our cat refuses to eat her food if the medicine is hidden in it but Lick-e-lix must be completely irresistible because she happily goes for that even with the evil poison mixed in. Hers is a liquid medicine but if she was on tablets I’d crush them and mix them in that way.

They're all different when it comes to what works.

My current go-to is a little jar of meat paste. You know the kind; tiny little glass jar you can get for less than a quid, and you eat it on buttered toast.

I squash it around the pill and serve to the cats, minus the buttered toast.

Some tablets shouldn't be crushed, either because they have a special coating that delays release of the contents until a particular part of the intestines, or because they've been designed to dissolve slowly, releasing the medication gradually so if you crush it, the cat gets too much medication at once. So be careful about this and check with the vet (this applies with human medication too!).

We use a putty designed specifically for giving pills. My 19yr old is on 2x daily tablets and cheese worked for a bit but it's not the best for long term use. Our vet recommended this putty and it works a treat!

I'm terrible at links but it's available on amazon. Search 'pill putty for cats'. There's a single pack if you only need it short term.

You can get a pill shooter thing from the Vets. Pop the pill on the end of it. Open Moggies mouth and fire it down the back of the throat. Late DCat had to use one each time he had a worming tablet cos he was a little monkey when it came to taking tablets. He'd either eat around it. Or eat it then bugger off and hide behind the settee and spit the tablet back out. I wouldn't mind but when he was younger he would literally eat the bloody things straight out of my hand as though they were kitty treats 😹

Ah sorry just read your OP properly and can see you've already tried it! Sorry OP, that's my fault!

Thank you all!! Lots of good ideas for me to try. The vet did say that the pills can be crushed so that's not a problem.

The pill shooters are good, work 9/10, they look like syringes and are just a few pounds on amazon

Just had another thought you could try.. if you go down the route of crushing and mixing with lick-e-lix or something similar; a little trick a vet taught me once was to smear it onto the fur on the back of their front paws - a little bit mean but it worked a treat when we had to give our cat fur ball gel!

My top tip, after a lot of trial and error, is to wrap it in prosciutto! The cheap, thin, slimy kind. It creates a really tight seal so they can't eat the meat and leave the pill.