Homemade Doggy Pill Pockets - link with several recipes

Since my dog has Reverse Sneezing I give her Allergy tables.  The pill pockets are really handy for those and for heartworn pills.  My dog thinks they are treats.  I like these links as they give several choices and recipes:

You can use these:

#1 Chicken hearts (or turkey hearts for larger dogs)
#2 Liver paté.
#3 Almond butter.
#4 Light cream cheese.
#5 Hotdog pieces.

Make Your Own Pill Pockets: https://moderndogmagazine.com/articles/diy-eat-hide-pill/103777

 A great solution would be making your own at home using simple ingredients. You can control exactly what goes into each pill pocket. You can also tweak the recipes to suit your dog's personal tastes. They do not last as long as store-bought pill pockets, but luckily, they can be frozen for up to 3 months.

https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Homemade-Pill-Pockets-for-Your-Dog

I thought I would post an update.  For the last year or so I have been using cheese slices that I mold to cover the pill.  

Our dog really likes them.  So much that I think she sometimes starts coughing to just get a treat.

I ran out of cheese and the cheese that I am using now just will not mold around the pill so I have been adding peanut butter to the cheese to make the pill stick.

I found this recipe that I am going to try:








Has anyone tried these?

Anne, our dog is a <5# Pomeranian, so his “treats” need to be small... tiny really.
Half of a large blueberry with a slit in the flesh to slip the pill into has worked. It can be slippery, and he can also “miss” the pill! (He’s a good boi and gets it off the floor)
Molded cheese around the pill always works! It is irresistible, and a bit sticky, so the pill remains inside and also the “treat” rarely gets dropped. Softer cheese like American is easier to mold than a drier cheese such as Cheddar.
Soft stuff such as peanut butter or Cheez-Whiz has always been hit-or-miss, taken readily but easy to miss the pills.
All of our methods have a side benefit of it all being “stuff we would eat” so there’s no waste, or extra effort. (As we cook homemade special kidney diet food for him...)

Kenneth Elwell wrote:Anne, our dog is a <5# Pomeranian, so his “treats” need to be small... tiny really.
Half of a large blueberry with a slit in the flesh to slip the pill into has worked. It can be slippery, and he can also “miss” the pill! (He’s a good boi and gets it off the floor)
Molded cheese around the pill always works! It is irresistible, and a bit sticky, so the pill remains inside and also the “treat” rarely gets dropped. Softer cheese like American is easier to mold than a drier cheese such as Cheddar.
Soft stuff such as peanut butter or Cheez-Whiz has always been hit-or-miss, taken readily but easy to miss the pills.
All of our methods have a side benefit of it all being “stuff we would eat” so there’s no waste, or extra effort. (As we cook homemade special kidney diet food for him...)

"half of a  large blueberry..."  I literally laughed out loud at that, thank you.  My dogs' pill pockets are the size of your dog

The key to pill pockets for really tricky dogs, the kind that eat the pocket and leave the pill, is to make the pocket as small as possible.  They will usually swallow it then, rather than chew it and spit out the pill.

Thanks for posting this Anne, I missed it the first time around.

I always just place the pill at the back of the mouth  so they have no choice but to swallow. My dogs take very few pills, so it works for me.

My last dog had an autoimmune disease and had to take pills every day, though. He got really good at not swallowing them. No matter what I hid them in, he'd find them and spit them out after eating whatever they'd been in.

What ended up working the best was to put the pill in the palm of my hand with a few pieces of dogfood. Once he had that in his mouth, I'd stick my other hand, full of dogfood, in his face for him to keep eating. The trick was to not give him time to figure out what was in his mouth, but get him to swallow a couple mouthfuls of food right away to wash down the pill.

He was a lean 130lbs. The technique probably wouldn't work so well for a little dog.

Yeah, my dogs have always been able to spit out things from pill pockets. I pop open their mouth, put the pill at the back of the throat, hold the mouth up and closed as they swallow, then give a treat (cheese or whatever). They are fine with it and lick their lips after the pill. A pillpocket also increases the time for the pill to work - we used to give gravol to one dog, who would take pills stuffed in things, but half an hour or more later in the car he'd throw up the gravol, still wrapped in the piece of cheese.  

The heartworm meds are annoying, they come as chewables that are way too big to force the dog to swallow, but my dog turns her nose up at them. Those get broken into small pieces, and mixed with canned food, and if that doesn't work, shoved one piece at a time down the throat.