Pill Pockets

Rudy takes a few pills each day and it is usually not a problem. We give him thyroid medicine twice a day by stuffing it inside a dice-sized cube of cheese. He eats it down with no problem. We use cheese for any small hard pill with great success. Rudy also takes Cyclosporine daily and it comes in a large capsule. We have been giving it to him wrapped inside a quarter of a piece of white bread spread with about a teaspoon of peanut butter. This has worked for a year or more. Until now.

Rudy is refusing to eat the peanut butter/white bread/ capsule. If we put it in his mouth, he either spits it out immediately or holds it in his mouth for a few minutes and then spits it out. He is absolutely refusing to take the capsule but is not objecting to his other pills in the cheese cube. The capsule is too large to insert into cheese so we went to the pet store and bought "Pill Pockets" made by Greenies. They cost about nine dollars for 30 pockets. They are made out of some sort of doughy product and you put the capsule inside and then mold the pill pocket up and around the capsule. So far these work. Rudy eats down the hidden capsule. We plan to use the pockets for a month, until we use up the package and we plan to go back to the peanut butter and white bread method. Maybe by then, Rudy won't object. Who knows?