water tastes better from the tap

Our cat is having treatment, and needs a pill every day or two. She’s always hated us giving her pills, so we usually ask the vet to do it. But now that pill-giving has become so frequent, we have to do it ourselves – preferably without chasing the cat round the house and wrestling her into submission. As the vet said, this isn’t good for anyone’s blood pressure.

He suggested tucking the pill into the cat’s favourite food. So we ground the pill and mixed it into her chicken with jelly, but she seemed to smell it, and left that portion untouched. Then we tried to conceal the pill inside something irresistible. We hid one inside a tiny lump of Cheddar cheese, on which the cat is quite keen. This worked for a little while, but then she got bored and wouldn’t eat Cheddar any more. One inspired day we tried Wensleydale with cranberries. Success! Our cat loved cheese with fruit. So we fed her fruity cheese until she discovered how to eat carefully around the pill, spitting it delicately into her bowl.

Next we tried wrapping the pill in thinly-sliced meats. The cat could take or leave (mostly leave) ham and salami, but she adored Spanish chorizo. That worked fine until chorizo became yesterday’s craze. When we went on holiday, our neighbours took over and reported that they’d had great success with pills enrobed in scraps of smoked salmon. However, we don’t often have smoked salmon in the house, so we reverted to Wensleydale, only to find that the cat had lost her taste for cranberries.

A bit of trial and error established that she had upgraded to white Stilton with apricots. But eventually that preference faded too. Then a friend suggested grinding up the pill with Marmite and butter, and letting the cat lick the gruesome paste off the back of a spoon, which she did with glee. But now in the hot weather she seems to find it disgusting. Where next in the journey round our store cupboard?