One of the cats was sick again in the night. We agreed that they might need worming, and I hunted around in the kitchen drawer to see if we had any pills, turning up a packet containing two. We decided that the big tabby and the black cat were the most likely to have been sick, based on the arcane intuition of long-term pet owners (where was the sick, which cats hunt, which one has lost a little weight recently) and that we'd dose them first, then get some more pills when we were going near the surgery.
You don't need scales to tell if a cat that's normally a healthy weight has lost some, as you can feel the amount of flesh over the base of the spine and the ribs every time you stroke it. I have sometimes surprised the vet by saying that one of the cats has lost weight, for the vet to say that it looks OK, but find when putting it on the scales that it has indeed lost 100g or so. This only works with animals that aren't overweight, unfortunately, so when it comes to the fat indignant tabby and Our Ginger they would probably have to lose more like 400g before it would be obvious.
We started with the black cat. I held him tucked against my stomach on the kitchen table and opened his jaws and the Systems Administrator threw in the pill, which was about the size of a tic tac, then squirted a little water out of a plastic syringe into his mouth to persuade him to swallow. A vet taught us this trick a few years back, and it used to work much better than massaging the animal's throat for what seemed like ages, while it held the pill in the corner of its mouth and stared at you mutinously. The black cat deftly spat the pill out again. The SA retrieved the tablet, I opened the cat's jaws, the SA dropped the pill into his mouth, and after a moment the cat ejected it. The pink colour was beginning to come off. We tried again, several times, the pill getting stickier and more difficult to shake off the SA's finger. We tried without the water, but that didn't work any better.
The cat closed his teeth around my thumb as I tried yet again to open his mouth, though without breaking the skin. This shows he is a very nice natured animal, since if he had chosen to shut them with force, the pill session would have ended bloodily at that point for the Systems Administrator to drive me to the walk-in centre at Colchester General for two stitches and a week's supply of antibiotics. Then the cat began to growl and wriggle, a warning that next time he might not be so polite about our digits. The pill by now was reduced to about half of its original size, some of it presumably dissolved in the cat's mouth, and some stuck to the SA's fingers.
We were obviously going to have to come up with a Plan B, so in desperation the SA stuck the remains of the pill to a Thomas Treat using a dab of spreadable butter, and offered it to the cat, who ate it without demur. We dosed the big tabby the same way without even trying to put the pill in his mouth, and he too ate his doctored treat. Mental note to self: remember to do it that way next time. The Thomas Treats are a marvellous invention. A friend gave us the first packet as a joke, or rather gave it to Our Ginger because she adores him. They come in little bags, and look just like ordinary dried cat food, but whatever is in them, cats find it irresistible. We save them mainly for consolation prizes after a cat has had to put up with some sort of medical procedure, but they are great for getting pills down impossible to dose animals. We originally came up with the pill-butter-treat sandwich for Our Geezer, who is insanely resistant to being given pills by any other method. Normally placid and easy to handle, he transforms into a furious orange demon, lashing out with his claws on front and hind feet and wriggling so hard you fear breaking his neck. But he is greedy, unsuspicious about food and crazy about Thomas Treats. I had thought that the black cat was easy to dose and forgotten about the treats method, but he is either getting cunning in his old age, or we're losing our touch.
I don't know whether the pill-treat combination would work on the fat indignant tabby. She is highly suspicious of anything novel, be it different food or the minutest alteration to her daily routine. Since in her thirteen years we have never seen her eat anything that didn't come out of a cat food tin or packet* we have taken the coward's way out, and don't dose her for tapeworm. We confessed this once to the vet, who admitted that she had an elderly, crabby, non-hunting cat that she didn't dose either. Sometimes you just have to take a view.
*That is a slight exaggeration. She will eat chicken meat (not skin) pulled off the carcass after you have boiled it for stock, but basically she believes that proper cat food comes from the supermarket in a container with a picture of a cat on it, and that any kind of meat left over from human food is highly suspect. As for mice, forget it, the unhygienic little blighters.
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