Dog flea and worming treatment- my ruff reality

In the above photo, you will see Clover looking very interested in the food I’m holding. Whether it’s one of her treats, human food, or an empty wrapper which sounds a bit like it might be something she can eat, Clover interest is peaked. This is the case regardless of what I have in my hand…unless of course, I am holding her dog flea and worming treatment. You see, Clover pretends lots of things. She pretends she can’t hear me sometimes when I call her. She pretends she’s fast asleep on the sofa when it’s bedtime and I’m trying to move her into her bed for the night. She also sometimes pretends not to understand commands, pretending that she is unintelligent. But Clover is intelligent (well, as far as Frenchie’s go), and so she knows when I’m holding the dog flea and worming treatment, and she knows that means that it is time to resist my attempts and make life as difficult for me as possible.

I never thought that my calendar would consist of things such as ‘order dog flea and worming tablets’ or ‘administer dog flea and worming tablets’ but here we are. Every three months. I order via the vet, I go and collect the treatment… and then Clover and I go into battle.

It’s as though as soon as I come home with the flea and worming tablets in my bag, despite them being sealed in foil, sealed in a box and wrapped up in a sealed bag, Clover knows. Now, I don’t think her sense of smell is that great, she certainly isn’t a sniffer dog, so I don’t know how she knows, but she does. She knows they are there and she knows that soon she must begin her ‘how long can I fight mummy on this’ routine and she runs away.

I’ve tried to get them out my bag when she isn’t in the room, and I always order them in good time so I can leave them tucked away in a drawer for a few days so that Clover doesn’t suspect anything. It doesn’t help, she always suspects, and I am losing this war.

How do I get my dog to take their flea and wormer?

With great difficulty, is my reply.

I’ve tried all the tricks that I can think of to get Clover to take her flea and worming pills. Hiding it in her favourite food works best, but even so we’re talking like 70% success rate. Below are some of the tricks we’ve tried… and the reality of how they went.

1. The switching between treats and tablets trick.
   This was hopeless. It didn’t work at all. The gist of it is you give your dog a treat, maybe even two. Then you swap out the treat for a tablet and they are none the wiser and take the tablet thinking they’re getting a reward. The dog has had it’s flea or wormer tablet, it is happy because it thinks it has had a treat and the world is perfect and happy and there are rainbows. Not in our house. Clover doesn’t take the tablet. She takes the treat happily, and a second, (sometimes even a third) but as soon as the tablet comes out she’s sniffing it and then backing away. Even when I then try to give her a normal treat instead she doesn’t trust me and won’t take it. It takes her a day or two to get over it and trust me again. I’ve tried different variations of this tactic. For example, I’ve made out that we are doing training and then rewarded her for ‘sit’, ‘stay, ‘paw’ etc and then swapped out the treat for a tablet and tell her ‘good girl’ in my high pitched voice as she follows my command. Follows my command, but doesn’t take the tablet. I’ve also tried the ‘which hand is the treat in game’. It works well until I put a tablet in my hand and try to play instead. For Clover knows which hand the tablet is in… and she’s not eating it! 1/10 she once licked the tablet but that’s as good as it got.
   
   
2. The forceful technique
   I hated this. It made me feel like the worst dog mum in the world. You get the dog to open their jaw and then put the tablet in their mouth and close it and hold their jaw shut. Clover panicked and started wriggling. I let her go because I felt mean, she spat the tablet out and then sulked with me for about a week and wouldn’t let me go anywhere near her. I don’t blame her, I’d have done the same. 0/10 not trying again.
   
   
3. The pocket treat
   Some bright spark thought up the idea to make pocket treats where they have room to hide the tablet in. A good idea and I’m sure very effective… unless you have a Clover. She took the treat with the pill in it (so, further along than we’d got with either of the above) chewed it for a bit and then spat it out. Another time she chewed round the pill and left it on the floor. 3/10 a good decoy but not quite good enough for my floppy eared detective.
   
   
4. The hiding it in food technique
   This works the best for us, but it doesn’t work every time. It also took a while to figure out what food Clover loved enough to eat with such eagerness that she failed to notice the tablet hidden inside. Chicken is by far her favourite food, but it didn’t work. I wrapped the pill up in some cooked chicken breast and she took it, spat it all out onto the floor and then ate the chicken only. The same thing happened with ham. Cheese is another all time favourite but the only way of doing it is by sandwiching the tablet between two slices of cheese and of course, this wasn’t enough to fool Clover. Then we tried pea’mutt’ butter. (To be clear, not actual human peanut butter because this is incredibly toxic for dogs. I’m talking the little dog peamutt butter than you can buy especially for pampered pooches). I take a large scoop of Peamutt butter, place the tablet on it and then roll it around until it is totally covered. This is by far the most effective method for getting Clover to take her flea and worming treatment, but she is getting wise to it. She has previously taken the peamutt butter ball, rolled it around in her mouth until the butter is off and then spat the tablet out on the floor. This results in me having to put yet more peamutt butter on it and coat it even more thickly. I am now using far more peamutt butter to administer her tablets than I ever have done, which is not a good thing cos, you know, calories. But I just can’t get her to take it any other way. Sometimes we’ll try the peamutt butter trick a few times and each time she just keeps licking off the peamutt butter and spitting the tablet out. So then I give up and we try again the next day. Sometimes she will take it, other times we can try for three or four days with no luck. I have, in the past, given up completely and just missed a dose because after a week of coaxing with every food under the sun she still won’t take it. 7/10 works most the time but not always. (For those of you interested, the Peamutt butter that Clover loves is https://peamutt.co.uk/products/ and you can buy it on amazon by clicking here.)
   
   
5. The ‘don’t let your dog see you preparing it’ trick
   I’ve also read that taking the tablet out the box in front of your dog an deter them because they can see it’s not a normal treat. I don’t know how true this is. They say to get it out the box out of sight of your dog and add it to their food when the dog isn’t looking. This makes no difference for Clover. She can smell it as soon as I step foot out the vets 10 miles down the road with it and, unless it’s smothered in 4 gallons of peamutt butter, she’s not interested. I’ve even put it in a bag of her other treats and excitedly told her it’s treat time. She knows it isn’t treat time, and she isn’t happy with my lies.
   
   
6. The ‘adding it to their dinner’ technique
   For most other dog owners that I speak to, their dog let’s them know when it’s time for breakfast and time for dinner and then wolfs down the food the moment it’s put in front of them. So much so, that some people have to buy slow feeders to give their dog time to digest. Obviously… this isn’t Clover. Unsurprisingly, Clover is very much on her own schedule. I put breakfast down for her around 8.00am every day. Some days she eats it by 10ish, other times it’s still there at 2.00pm when she then tucks in for a late lunch. Very occasionally she may eat it within half an hour of me putting it down. It depends on the day and how she feels. It’s the same with dinner. I put it down around 6.30pm and sometimes she eats it, some times she doesn’t. Sometimes I genuinely get woken up by the sound of her eating it at midnight. A midnight snack if you will. The point being, Clover never wolfs down her dinner. She can take it or leave it, and sometimes she takes half of it and leaves the rest for later. So, obviously, hiding the flea and wormer in the dinner bowl doesn’t work. Because she’s never ravenous enough to eat it all without a second thought. I have tried this way of getting her to take the tablet many times and every single time without fail I return to the bowl later in the day and there is one singular treat size tablet left alone in the bowl every time. 1/10. May have worked once when she was a lot younger but I can’t quite honestly remember.
   

So, maybe that’s helpful. Maybe it isn’t. Who knows. If anyone has any other ideas on how to get dog flea and worming treatment in this darn hound, do drop me a message via our instagram page.

If you missed any of my previous diary updates, you can find them at ‘the diary of my ruff reality.’

Alternatively, head to ‘nobody warned me about…’ to read about the dog ownership topics that I wish someone had told me about before I got Clover.

Thinking of getting a dog? Visit my ‘top tips page’ for important things that I probably should have considered further before buying my floppy eared hound!

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