My pets are my friends, and they help my well-being. Many people could agree! So, keeping them healthy is crucial. Here I’ll share a bit of the tools and techniques that work for us:
1. Covered cup as pill organizer: Condiments cup, after cleaning out the leftover salad dressing from the pizza shop. Good size for a small collection of pills, and the lid stays shut well enough, and it’s free.
2. Pill splitter & crusher: This one has a top compartment to split the pill without the pieces scattering everywhere, (ever try a knife and cutting board to half a pill?!) plus a section for storing pills, and the bottom section for crushing pills into dust in case one wants to try that method.
3. Liquid meds dispenser: The plan here is to get the tip into the side of the cat’s mouth and squirt the meds towards the other internal cheek. Don’t shoot that liquid straight to the back or it might go down the breathing pipe and into the lungs, and that’s not good. It’s a syringe without a needle.
4. Pill popper: Load a dry pill into the tip, and use this syringe-like action to toss that pill as far back into the mouth as possible.
5. Calming spray for cats’ environment: I spray this on the towel for the cat burrito, and inside the carrier case about 10 minutes before transportation.
6. Wound spray to promote healing on the animal’s skin: The spray sound scares my cats so it never lands on the cat. But the idea is, to coat the wound on the skin (usually bites from fighting outdoors, or thorns) to promote healing. Possibly more useful for dogs.
BONUS: Fresh rope to refurbish my cat scratching tree: With some finishing nails or a staple gun plus a few dabs of glue, I rewrapped the cats’ scratch pole with this fresh rope. Just be sure to wrap each round of rope tightly against the previous round and one can save a lot by not having to buy a new tree.
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For one of my street rescue cats, all the “pill hiding in food” tricks just won’t work: he sniffs out and avoids the med at all costs no matter how well I hide it inside tasty foods. Using the pill popper didn’t work for me, but it may for more calm animals; in every strategy he would spit the pill out, or avoid the food completely, whether the pill was ground to dust or sandwiched inside choice smoked salmon. So for him, I had to use the Purrito Restraint Method with the liquid formulation of the medication measured and loaded into a liquid syringe, for him to swallow that liquid orally.
For my other street rescue cat, I found that hiding the medication inside gelcaps works fine, and he still eats the meat and swallows the half-pill whole, without noticing my trick. Here’s how this works, no Cat Purrito needed:
These empty gelcaps I simply collected from vitamins whenever I emptied them into a drink instead of swallowing whole; sometimes I’d like the vitamin to be more fast-acting without having to dissolve the gelcap in the tummy first. I saved the gelcaps just in case, for a job such as this. Here’s my process for splitting a pill in two, and cutting a center piece out of the empty gelcap, and loading that half-pill into the gelcap and closing it up again. In this way, no pill taste gets into the cat’s food, and one cat is able to swallow the gelcap not noticing that it’s buried in a lump of meat.
Fuzzy photo, I know, but nope I’m not staging it again to take another picture. It’s good enough.
Cat Burrito technique (Purrito):
I suspect that to film videos like this, the vet most likely drugged their cat to make him nearly comatose prior to attempting a film session. Normal cats will not sit still for this towel malarkey. Mine, being rescued street cats, are so athletic and high-speed that I was seriously concerned I would not be able to apply this technique alone, thus rendering me incapable of administering the pills or liquid meds. So I show the video here for teaching, however, in practice, you’d probably need more speed, coordination, and perhaps an extra set of hands:
Further complicating this at home – most people do not have an appropriate table or counter. That stainless steel operating table at the vet is amazing. So, while wrangling this on the floor, I took the benefit of using my knees to hold the burrito together while one hand holds the cat’s head still and the other hand gets the syringe with liquid meds into the side of the cat’s mouth, aiming to force the cat to drink the meds. Once I got the hang of it, it’s a quick 60 second process start to finish.
Thanks to all who care about animals!
And thanks to all who support my work.
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