Top 10 Tips to Follow To Provide Horses Oral Medications

It’s quite tough to get your horses to take their medication. When it comes to eating pills, they become really stubborn. Nevertheless, administering a precise dosage of medicines is really imperative to your horse’s health. Sometimes, you might need veterinary services in MA to give your horses prescribed oral medications. 

Veterinarians in Worcester, MA, suggest grabbing an oral syringe in case your horse is choosy when it comes to taking its medication. Instead of administering the medicines intravenously, give them orally. And this process makes sure all the medication is consumed properly, not half eaten or ignored. 

10 Useful Tips to Provide Your Horses Oral Medications 

1. Powder medicines come in different flavors and are easy to feed your horse. Due to the flavors, some horses don’t create any mess and eat them with no hassle. 
2. When you are feeding pills instead of powders, just crush them. You can utilize a coffee grinder or a clean mortar and pestle for doing this. Here keep in mind that you must not crush some coated pills. Do consult one of the reliable veterinarians in Worcester, MA for recommendations. 
3. If your horse is not convinced with powder-form meds, you can add a liquid like molasses, apple juice, or water and grind the medicine in it. However, don’t add any sugary substance if your horse has metabolic issues like insulin resistance or EMS (Equine Metabolic Syndrome). 
4. Next, you can try adding some favorite tasty treats of your horse like beet pulp, alfalfa pellets, apple or carrot slices to the mixture. 
5. Although one horse doesn’t like his medicine mix, another one may like it and take all the tasty treats alongside its medicine dosage. Ensure to let the horse take his medication by itself. 
6. A few horses are clever enough to eat the treats only while leaving the dosage in their feed buckets. Don’t forget to check their bucket to be assured that no portion of doses is left behind. 
7. Some horses are really stubborn and don’t like to eat the medicines even if they are given their tasty treats. For them, you might require using a syringe for administering them straight into the mouth. Make a mixture of medication powder and applesauce without any sugary substance and draw it into the syringe. This no-sugar-added applesauce changes the bitter taste of the medication. Since horses usually understand that the syringe contents taste awful, mix the meds with applesauce to treat them more easily. 
8. No matter if you don’t have applesauce. Some pills easily dissolve in water. For these, you can load the right dosage into the syringe and dissolve it. First, remove the plunger, plug its open end using your finger, then add some water, change the plunger, and finally shake it until it gets mixed properly. Make sure that the medicine and the plunger don’t fly out at the time of shaking the mixture. 
9. To feed medications, lame your horse, move the syringe up one side of the mouth of your horse inside its cheek, and try administering the mix onto its tongue. Don’t forget to hold its head up until it swallows the mix completely. While dosing your horse with paste meds which come in preloaded syringes, you can utilize this similar method. 
10. If the horse is unwilling to swallow, put a bit in his mouth by running your thumb on its tongue between the teeth. This leads a horse to move his tongue actively and swallow.