My dog had knee surgery Tuesday. She has 4 medications to take everyday. 3 are not chewable. She is allergic to wheat, which is a primary ingredient in pill pockets.
I made my own using peanut butter, homemade oat flour, and pumpkin puree. But I need something more shelf stable, so I replaced the pumpkin puree with liver powder. The new version is very sticky, and not pliable like store bought pill pockets. So when I roll them out into balls, over a short period of time they coalesce back into one giant glob.
Looking for ideas for an add in that will help me get them less sticky.
For those unfamiliar with pill pockets.
My first batch of homemade
Dog tax
Edit: while I appreciate how everyone is giving their dogs pills (except you mouth stuffers, give the pupper a damn treat), I am really looking for ways to perfect my pill pocket recipe.
I’m sorry to hear that you and your dog are going through all this (but thanks for paying the appropriate tax - she’s a cutie!). Any reason you can’t just give her the pills in a glob of peanut butter, either all at once or one at a time? Does she find the pill and spit it out?
My first thought is that you need something to bind it all together. Maybe egg or psyllium husk or something? Or maybe you’ll need to bake it for a short while to get it to hold and remove the moisture? I don’t have a good answer for you, but you may want to cross-post to [email protected], [email protected], or maybe [email protected].
ETA: any reason they need to be shelf stable and you can’t refrigerate or freeze them? This page has some good recipe options but they all require refrigeration. And this person uses coconut flour instead of oat, but also refrigerates them.
Her current schedule has 3 dosings after bedtime. My wife’s cat lives in the room we are sequestered. My son’s cat tries to sneak into the room to fight with my wife’s cat. So if I can avoid leaving the room as much as possible to prevent him from getting into the room it makes everyone’s life better.
Ah, the intricacies of multi-pet politics. 🙂
In that case I would probably make something that needs to be refrigerated but then just take out the required dosage (three pockets) as I’m going to bed. No matter what the ingredients are they’ll be fine out of the fridge for a few hours. You could also try rice flour instead of oats.
It looks like Presidio has a line of wheat-free pill pockets for dogs. (They do have barley in the ingredients, though.) Sorry for the Amazon link. They do seem to be available at a few other places as well.
Hmm, those contain brewers yeast. I am going to try adding some nutritional yeast to mine. I thought about xanthan gum, but it is a corn byproduct and unsure how she will react to that.
This is probably what I am going to do.
I can give them to her in a glob of peanut butter, but she has been spitting out the pills that way.
Not sure egg would make it shelf stable, which is why I cut out the pumpkin puree.
Not sure how you do it, but I put the glob of peanut butter with pill inside on my fingers instead of just in a bowl. Force them to grab the pill first and keep stuffing peanut butter in front of their mouth with other fingers. Keeps them busy and excited enough they forget and swallow the pill
In addition to Dr.Banjos suggestion, our vet suggested the “three meatballs” trick, where you offer the pet a treat with no pill inside, when they eat it, you give them a treat with the pill inside, and then promptly another treat without the pill inside, so they swallow the pill quickly without spitting it out. It works pretty good, and you can keep repeating as many times as you need for the required number of pills.