Giving medication can be very complicated

For many dogs, giving medication is gloriously boring:
One tablet. Once a day. Fluffy thinks it’s cheese. Finished on Tuesday.
Hurray. 
But it can become complicated remarkably quickly: several medications; different timings; one with food and another without; half tablets; changing doses; drops as well as tablets; temporary and ongoing treatments together; more than one dog; somebody else helping; a missed dose; something spat out; a label you can barely read; a leaflet the length of the M6; conflicting-seeming information...

And suddenly "give the dog her medicine" has become a surprisingly demanding task, practically and emotionally.

 
There's such a colourful range of ways in which things can go wrong that it's amazing that we usually get it right! Here are some of the most common mistakes. I've made pretty much all of them at least once! They were one of the reasons that I created the Managing Medications at Home resources.

The devotion and creativity of dogs' humans was so striking from survey responses. Many people will identify with the person who wrote: "Difficult managing any social arrangements, even Xmas day is all around the dogs medication schedule.”
 
This web feature breaks things down into manageable parts, with accompanying downloadable Help! sheets for specific situations.

The challenges include:

Storage mistakes

• Not keeping medicines at the right temperature (eg fridge vs cupboard, in direct sunlight etc).
• Using out-of-date medicines
• Running out of medication

Giving it incorrectly

• Forgetting to give it at all, or forgetting we have given it and giving it again (or confusion with other people in the household about giving it)
• Giving too much or too little
• Giving the wrong dose by the dog’s weight
• Not completing the full course
• Giving it with food when it’s meant to be before/after and vice versa
•  Splitting or crushing tablets incorrectly
• Mistakes with liquid medicine such as confusing mg vs ml, not shaking the bottle before using it, using the wrong syringe/spoon

 
Wrong medicine, wrong part of the body, wrong animal or even wrong species

• Giving the wrong medication - eg because packaging or pills look confusingly like each other
• Putting the medication in the wrong place – ear drops in eyes, eye drops in ears etc
• Giving the medication to the wrong dog
• Giving dog medicine to a cat (or vice versa)
• Using human medication for pets. Sometimes this is accidental – people getting into a muddle over whose medication is whose, and unintentionally giving our dogs our own or our family’s medication. One survey respondent accidentally swallowed their dog's medication because they were so used to taking several medications themselves and picked up the wrong pills while on "auto-pilot".

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Dogs not wanting to swallow pills

• Dogs can be expert at detecting the unusual, sometimes unpleasant, smell, taste texture etc of pills.
• Many will be familiar with our dogs leaving the pills in the bowl if they’re given with food, or hiding, spitting out or even vomiting up the pills. (Apparently cats are even worse)

Our dogs can be surprisingly good at detecting pills

The good news is that there are lots of small things that can help. The rest of this feature shares practical ideas, downloadable Help! sheets and other resources that we hope will make giving medication at home a little easier.