How do I make foods sticky for my dog?

October 6, 2019 6:22 AM

This good girl was just diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathy and congestive heart failure. Her prescription and supplement regimen is 16 pills a day. She is extremely picky and extremely smart, so this has been challenging. Many popular pill hiding options have failed because even if they’re high value treats, she can eat around the medication. We have a week to go before we see the specialist and learn more about compounding options, so I’m looking for ways I can make some homemade tasty treats that cling to the pills the way cream cheese or peanut butter does. Difficulty: she hates peanut butter.
posted by ferociouskitty to Food & Drink (27 answers total)

There are SO many pills. I think your best option might be the back of the throat and tip up the head deal with a high value treat right after. Look on line for the specific technique.

I always tried the sneaky way but the more pills they need, the better they get at eating the good stuff and spitting out the pill.
posted by beccaj at 6:30 AM on October 6, 2019

I use liver pate, but my dog is incredibly greedy, so he's not a good example. I'm wondering if you could make tiny pies or ravioli for her, with the pills in them. I'm thinking using premade wonton wraps and filling them with liver pate and pills before baking or boiling.
posted by mumimor at 6:59 AM on October 6, 2019

EZ cheese?
posted by notsnot at 7:00 AM on October 6, 2019

Pumpkin puree works great & it's low fat. My pill hating dog takes 4-6 pills with a teaspoon or so of pumpkin. We've also used baked sweet potato which holds together a bit better but is less sticky
posted by ellebee at 7:18 AM on October 6, 2019

I know you said homemade but just wanted to mention Pill Pockets. They have different sizes so they can take several pills at once.
My dog can’t have them so I hold his mouth open and drop the pills down, we’re both used to it by now. Pill Pockets were a lot easier.
posted by dianeF at 7:26 AM on October 6, 2019

I've done:
1. Chicken paste: cook some chicken thighs (skinless, but no other fat removed) in a crockpot or other covered container. run the chicken and liquid in a food processor to make a paste. refrigerate overnight. In the morning you will have a cheap chicken pate that is easily molded around a pill, and you can just toss the pill ball at her (which she will hopefully catch and swallow- mine just lets them bounce off her face and then eats it)
2. salmon paste: can of salmon and some shredded cheese get mixed together with a sprinkling of instant mashed potato flakes. microwave to melt the cheese and get it good and mixed. stick in the fridge, mold around pill. Bonus is that it's pretty stinky, so my picky eater really likes it.

And if you can (check with the vet), break the larger pills into smaller bits- harder to eat around them if they are tiny
posted by dogmom at 7:37 AM on October 6, 2019 [4 favorites]

Dissolve the pills in a bit of warm water and stir them into what she regularly eats.
posted by effluvia at 7:47 AM on October 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

Not home made, but my guy is a sucker for Tomlyn Pill Masker.
posted by zamboni at 7:55 AM on October 6, 2019

I've got a picky pill partaker too.

One thing that works for us is to use string cheese. I usually break a stick into threes, and cram a few pills into each. It sometimes helps to let the cheese get a little old and stinky.

I usually have to rotate through a few different pill delivery techniques: cheese, canned cat food, whatever human leftovers are in the fridge, Greek yogurt*, chewy dog treats, Pill Pockets, etc.

I wonder if your she would like other nut butters? My dogs really like the Kirkland Signature Mixed Nut Butter from Costco.

*Dairy gives my dog excessively stinky gas, so that's a technique of last resort.
posted by SuperSquirrel at 7:59 AM on October 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

Our best luck has been with slices of hot dog (smaller pills; won't work with the big pills because the slice splits) - I found that chicken franks have the best cohesion rate, but your mileage may vary, and cubes of Velveeta.

Also when we were having to pill a lot, with larger pills: a meatball made of raw ground beef. Get the good stuff, go for higher fat content, and if you feel like getting super gourmet you can also buy beef marrow to mix into it. You know how cooking shows always warn you not to overwork your meatballs/meatloaf/hamburgers because it makes them dense and pasty? You actually do want to overwork this a little bit to up the stickiness. Batch-roll appropriate sizes of ball (sit down with baking sheets or plates that will fit in your freezer, lined with parchment, and Netflix and roll a hundred balls), keep only a few days' worth thawed in the fridge at a time. Freeze the rest on the baking sheets and then decant into baggies (portion your few days' worth in each baggie, then move the baggie to the fridge when it's time to thaw a new batch - I also do this process with my weenie bits, and see my final note).

IF raw meat isn't compelling to her (obviously test this before rolling a hundred dog meat balls), you could parcook/char the outside with a culinary torch or quickly toss into a hot skillet and take out again, but you really want the inside raw because that's where the stickiness is. You could even mix a bit of egg yolk, tartare-style, into the meat mixture before rolling.

I have experimented with pre-pilling the meatballs and refrigerating them. Don't do that. It doesn't work. There will be regrets.

The big success component of this process has been that when I make my hot dog or beef pill pockets, I also make smaller empty bits. When we pill the dog, she gets one small bit to prime her interest, the pill pocket, and then instantly hold up the final bit so she swallows what's in her mouth in urgency to get to the next one. You could use the stuff she finds high-value but doesn't hold pills as well for your motivator bits, too.
posted by Lyn Never at 8:02 AM on October 6, 2019 [8 favorites]

Oh, and my husband came up with this at some point: dogs will read your mood and microexpressions, and if you're coming at them across the room filled with dread at the fight you're about to have to pill them, they 100% know it. So whenever the dogs get medicine, he goes into hype mode: "Come on, it's your BIRTHDAY! Let's have birthday cake! Yum yum cake for puppies, oh boy!" We keep all the pilling supplies in a mini-fridge, so that's always where we go when it's time for birthday cake, and...it works. We've got one dog who will trot right over to the birthday cake fridge for eye drops and her reward, multiple times a day.

It does mean occasionally one of us is on the ground half-covered in butter (the eye drop dog is more food-suspicious than the others and certain pills will disintegrate while she considers it, so we have to just coat it in butter and push it down her throat) yelling about birthday cake, but it's amazing how much more cooperative dogs are about a bunch of things if your energy and body language says that this is great and everybody's having a good time.
posted by Lyn Never at 8:09 AM on October 6, 2019 [14 favorites]

Get your dog really excited with two or three treats they just chomp down and then slip in the pill treat in a high value treat like cheese. This works better if you have another dog you can treat simultaneously.
posted by xammerboy at 8:13 AM on October 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

push the pill into hotdog pieces. Throw dog one or two large-ish pieces of hotdog without the medicine, then the one with the medicine.

As for sticky foods, maybe something with Asian sticky rice?
posted by Neekee at 10:05 AM on October 6, 2019

I'm another one of the believers in rotating your pill delivery techniques. There are a lot of good ones here-- I'm excited to try the few I haven't encountered before. The one alternative I haven't seen here which almost always works for us with our very picky seizure dog who has to take 11 pills spread across three different sessions is-- ice cream. We use plain vanilla, and I look for one made with cane sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup. I didn't know dogs have a major sweet tooth until someone here on Metafilter suggested this to us more than ten years ago, and I've been grateful ever since.
posted by seasparrow at 10:22 AM on October 6, 2019

I was struggling with this too - she got so good at spitting out pills . In the end what really worked for me was a tin of tuna with a little bit of warm water in a bowl. I mixed the pills into it well and fed it before the main meal. NB my dog was on a kibble only diet so tuna was a massive treat for her - YMMV.
posted by teststrip at 10:33 AM on October 6, 2019

Turkey baby food, in the little jar. It is SO highly palatable that our vet said it is what they use for their nauseous, post-operative dogs to trick them into eating. We didn't even need to hide pills in it for our previous dog; she would eat ANYTHING coated in a bit of turkey baby food.

Make sure it's the just turkey-water-corn starch kind. Om nom nom.
posted by lysimache at 11:56 AM on October 6, 2019

Seconding the recommendations for Greenies pill pockets. We have a chihuahua who is extremely picky about her meds (though she loves all sorts of actual food), and since she's so small we have to quarter most of her pills... which gets nasty pill-taste all over whatever we try. Pill pockets have been a godsend. They're the only thing that are moldable enough we can fully encase a pill and tasty enough that she scarfs them up without much investigation. Peanut butter is our favorite flavor, but they have others like chicken or cheese or beef.
posted by lilac girl at 12:01 PM on October 6, 2019

In case nothing suggested so far works, maybe grind them into a paste with honey. About the consistency of peanut butter. You can smear it on their gums if they won’t lick it off your finger or a spoon. That’s the ONLY thing that worked for our picky eater.
posted by probably not that Karen Blair at 12:08 PM on October 6, 2019

I had the same problem so I got a pill grinder from the drug store and add about a teaspoon of Solid Gold Green Beef Tripe recipe to the ground pills. It comes in smallish plastic packets which are a nice amount for how little I use at a time. It’s worked great.
posted by quiet coyote at 2:15 PM on October 6, 2019

The only thing that worked for us was putting the pill in a ball of cream cheese with lots of bacon bits mixed in so that the pill was not so noticeable.
posted by LiverOdor at 2:17 PM on October 6, 2019

VELVEETA!
posted by Cocodrillo at 6:27 PM on October 6, 2019

Alternative solution: I know for difficult-to-pill cats that vets can either use long-lasting injections or send medications to a compounding pharmacy to be turned into a cream that you rub inside your cats ears and they absorb the drug through their skin. I assume that the same should be true for dogs, so if none of the suggestions above work, ask your vet about alternatives to oral intake.

I had a cat that was missing his lower jaw and thus it was impossible to give him medication orally, and his vet was able to come up with alternative methods for every medication prescribed. It was a bit more expensive than pills but not ridiculously so.
posted by Jacqueline at 2:58 AM on October 7, 2019

- crush as many pills as you're allowed to, using a pill crusher (if it's a time release or has a capsule or coating, you shouldn't crush)

- mix ground pills (and if necessary, include one or two whole pills) with a blob of wet dog food that has chicken liver as its first ingredient...stinky and high value to dogs

- for extra disguise, take a thin slice of deli meat and lightly smear it with room-temperature butter or bacon grease. Place the blob of wet dog food on the greasy side, and roll it up in the deli meat. Tuck in the sides of the deli meat as you roll so that no wet dog food is exposed, and you have layer upon layer of deli meat with grease in between. When it's all rolled up, gently smush it so the dog can't unwrap it.
posted by Former Congressional Representative Lenny Lemming at 4:54 AM on October 7, 2019

When one of our dogs figured out most of the other solutions, I started grinding up a combination of some good smelling meat, shredded cheese, and a soft cheese like cream cheese or feta in a food processor. Adjust to a consistency that is sticky and use that to coat the pills. It was also important to give her a couple balls of pill-free paste first to get her excited so she would just swallow without chewing. For her it was also important to use just enough to coat the pill, and not make it a big ball of meat/cheese paste, because the bigger the piece the more likely she was to try to bite it. And once she bites into a pill, whatever was being used to disguise that pill has to be taken out of rotation for months.

We have another dog who is hopeless and not food motivated, so he picks the pill out of anything or just chooses not to eat it. He gets the pill shoved in the back of the throat technique with a good treat afterwards.
posted by thejanna at 6:09 AM on October 7, 2019 [1 favorite]

Do you have a compounding pharmacy nearby? I worked at one and we were always making very pet-appealing oral suspensions of drugs for this very reason. Might be an option to consider making the meds something your dog wants to eat rather than something you have to trick her into eating.
posted by Saminal at 6:37 AM on October 7, 2019

I'll give another +1 for grinding up the pills. I have a cat who is extremely difficult to pill even using the burrito method. Fortunately cats, like dogs, don't have a great sense of taste, especially compared to their strong sense of smell. Ground up pills in something aromatic are slurped up readily. I don't use a pill grinder; just a mortar and pestle. A mere 1/2 Tbs of warmed up cat food hides both a ground up pill, and an emptied capsule worth of meds.
posted by nobeagle at 7:12 AM on October 7, 2019

Have you asked your vet about getting compounded liquid meds instead of solid pills? That's the route we went when our girl was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy. Bonus: the compounding pharmacy would mix in chicken flavoring, which made her actually enjoy taking her medicine. Everything was handled online once we get set up by the vet.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 11:55 AM on October 7, 2019