Tricking a Senile Dog into Taking His Medicine

[MineralMan]

Lately, Donald J. Trump's apparent dementia seems to have worsened. His rallies and tweets are getting more and more bizarre. That has caused me to think about something I recently started doing.

Our aging beagle/basset mix, Dude, has doggy dementia now. His tail still wags as always, but he has gone deaf and is often off his feed. Our veterinarian suggested that we give him glucosamine and chondroitin for his arthritis and melatonin for his anxiety. The latter seems to come on late at night, when he comes in and wakes us up with vocalizations and requires calming.

However, he doesn't always eat his food predictably. The arthritis pill is huge, and hard to hide in his food, to make matters worse. I can give it to him in some braunschweiger, but that means crushing the large pill and trying to conceal it, which is a messy business that leaves me with smelly fingers.

So, this Saturday, on my weekly supermarket trip, I bought a container of chicken livers in the meat department. Then, on Sunday, I cooked them in some salted water and then sautéed them in butter. I had trimmed them carefully, and made sure to keep the pieces large enough to enable pill hiding. Into a quart Ziploc bag they went, once they had cooled. I confess that I munched some of the smaller pieces, which tasted very, very good. I'm rather fond of chicken livers.

This week, I have been cutting the huge pill into four quarters. I cut slits in four of the pieces of liver and then insert the pill quarters into the slit to hide them. A smaller piece of liver gets the small melatonin pill stuffed inside.

No matter how blasé the daffy dog is about his food, he cannot resist the smell of liver. I warm the pieces with a 15-second heating in the microwave to make them even more enticing. Now, at 4:30 PM, Dude is sitting in the living room, tail wagging eagerly as he awaits his drugged treat. Problem solved.

Perhaps we could offer the current resident of the White House some much-needed medication by stuffing it into pieces of liver, just as I do for my addled pup. I'm not sure what medication that would be, but am certain a physician could prescribe something.