Trick My Picky Pooch

Okay, another post totally unrelated to writing, but my husband and I are almost at the end of our respective ropes.  Our elder dog Daisy has developed incontinence.  That in itself is not a big deal as it is easily controlled by medicine.  The problem, it’s twice a day for the rest of her life and we are running out of ways to get her to take it without forcing it down her throat (which makes her not want to come near us because she hates it–obviously).  See, Daisy is half border collie and she is BRILLIANT.  Everything we try works once or twice and then she looks at us like “You really don’t think I’m that stupid, do you?” and goes and hides under the kitchen table.

:headdesk:

Of course she’s the dainty eater.  If this were Callie she’d take the pill, hidden in whatever we chose, and gulp it down without chewing.  Not Daisy.

We have tried putting it in small amounts of leftovers, in small soft treats (which doesn’t work too well as these pills are bigger than the antibiotics we usually manage that way and the treats fall apart), covered in yogurt, in the gravy from her Gravy Train for breakfast and dinner, peanut butter, wadded up in cheese, scrambled eggs, in lunchmeat, in bread (the bread thing worked the longest).  As soon as she figures it out, she just daintily eats her dinner or the treat and manages to lick around the pill or crack open whatever we’ve hidden it in so that the pill (or most of it) falls out.  Someone suggested hot dogs, but since this is going to be a long term thing, I have concerns over the nitrates.

Seriously people, this is getting ridiculous.  She’s getting to the point where she won’t even take treats from us if she doesn’t actually see it come directly from the treat bucket into her mouth.  If we take any time to mess with it, she won’t touch it.  We don’t want to make our baby miserable, but it’s not like the incontinence is an okay thing to live with.

So give me suggestions!  You’re a creative bunch.  What else can we try?

3 thoughts on “Trick My Picky Pooch

  1. My blue heeler was like that…poor dear. She’d do the same thing with eating everything around the pill so that only the pill sat in her dish.

    We finally went back to the vet…he was able to prescribe a chewable version of her med that she thought was a treat and it worked. Don’t know if that’s an option for your fur baby’s meds but it might be worth a try.

  2. I think Daisy is a bit too big for this but with Chester, we can just grab his jaws and force them open with one hand, then put the treat far back enough on his tongue that he can’t get it back out, then we immediately give him a treat as a chaser so he won’t think about trying to cough it out.

    It sounds cruel but you’ve been around Chester–he is so compliant that it’s not a big fight. It’s more like open, pill, treat, pets and praise.

    1. Yeah that so doesn’t work with Daisy. We had to do it with the 2 week run of antibiotics she took and that’s where part of this “oh hell no I’m not taking that” has come from.

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