If you're like most pet owners, you undoubtedly want your furry friend to enjoy a long and healthy life; so you make sure to schedule regular veterinary visits, and when your pet is ill or injured, you follow your vet's directions to the letter. If you've ever had to give your pet oral medication, however, you probably also know that this can be problematic.

To give your pet oral medication, you'll need to hold their mouth open with one hand, use the other hand to place the pill as far back as possible in the mouth, close the mouth, and then rub the throat in a downward motion to encourage the animal to swallow. This often works the first few times and is usually the best choice when medication is only needed for the short term. However, pets frequently learn to circumvent this procedure, and pills often end up being spit out onto the floor after the owner thinks they've been swallowed. If you've got to give your pet medication for any length of time, it's very likely that you will need to find a good workaround to ensure that your pets actually gets its medicine.

The following are three strategies designed to help pet owners safely and effectively administer their furry friend's medication. 

Pill Droppers

Sometimes referred to as gun tablets, pill droppers resemble syringes and are designed to deposit medication farther back into your pet's throat than you'll be able to reach yourself, and this makes it more likely that your pet will simply swallow the medication rather than surreptitiously spitting it out — the trick is to get it far enough back in your pet's throat so that it can't taste the medicine. Although this seems better designed for liquid medication, many pet owners have had success when using it to administer medicine in pill form. 

Mixing the Medication With Food

Many pet owners who need to give medication on a long term basis find that mixing it with some type of food provides the best results. Some are able to simply crush up pills into the pet's regular food or stir it in if it's liquid medication, but in cases where the taste of the medication is strong or the animal otherwise doesn't like it, the food, as well as the medicine, may go uneaten.  Wrapping a pill in a small piece of bacon will work for most dogs — as many love bacon. However, consuming bacon or other fatty food on a daily basis may be detrimental to your pet's health as much as they may love the taste.  It's also important to note that cats typically don't fall for this ruse — they don't gulp their food the way their canine counterparts do, so this approach rarely works with them.  

Compounded Pet Medication 

Compounded pet medications are medications that have been customized for use by an individual pet — or in some cases, a group of pets, but this scenario doesn't come into play in the average household. For instance, if you simply can't get a pill down your dog's throat and are would rather not go the bacon route because of possible negative health effects, your vet can have an animal compounding pharmacist replicate the drug in a different form. The most common example of this is for them to take a medication that is administered orally and change it to gel form that can be absorbed through your pet's skin. This is an excellent option for cats as well as for some dogs. The pharmacist may also add a delicious flavoring — such as bacon — to your pet's pills in order to make them irresistible. 

To learn more, contact an animal compounding pharmacist near you.