How to Get a Dog to Take a Pill

I own a 120 pound Bull Mastiff. Very strong dog that is also very picky in what he wants to eat. You would think that all dogs eat just about anything, but no, not mine... he is actually picky with treats, food, basically everything. Just like every dog, he gets sick or has problems and we need to give him a pill.

If you try to give him one, there is no way he is going to take it. You can try to cut it up into little pieces and put it in his food, but you don't know if he is going to get the full pill or not. You can try to mask it, but my dog is smart enough to eat around it. So what do you do, how do you get a dog to take a pill?

Of course each dog is different, so I will tell you what I do. There are certain foods that my dog likes, chicken, meatballs, cheese, turkey... funny thing is, if you give him too much of the same food over a couple days or a week, he will actually stop eating it. So we have to change things up. Amazing how similar we are.

My dog has a lot of allergies and we had many issues and we had to feed him meat and rice for a while, or boil a chicken... we couldn't find dog food that he could eat, he would break out into hives and it was bad for a while. So we had to cook for him until we found dog food that he was able to eat. We finally figured it out, but he got so used to us cooking that he didn't want to eat dog food. Can you really blame him?

To get to my point of this article, if you are trying to get a dog to take a pill, the easiest way is to wrap it in food. Now, they can eat around it, that is what my dog does. So you could go through a decent amount of cheese or chicken or whatever you have.

You can try to give the pill whole or cut it in half or quarters. That will depend on the size of the pill to start. In the end you will "trick" them into eating.

Hope this article helped on how to get a dog to take a pill. If your dog is sick, I hope your pooch gets better soon.