Feeding mouse medication.

_Nicola

Marvel is currently on an antibiotic and anti-inflammatory medication for his respiratory infection along with being syringe fed baby food, but unfortunately, being the stubborn little mousey he is, refuses to take his medication.
I've tried sneaking it onto his favorite food, he took a bite and obviously hated the taste and ignored the rest. I've tried syringe feeding, I ended up squirting him in the face :s. My most successful attempt was when I put a dob of it onto my hand and smudged it onto his mouth, he ended up licking it off, but I didn't manage to do it again. Since he is such a young hyper-active mouse, it's hard to keep him still. Does anyone have any ideas?

_racingmouse

Hi Nicola. Looking at what you have tried already and Marvel isn`t too keen on taking his medication on food, you could try putting the Baytril in his drinking water, but you would need to (a) look at the concentration on the bottle and (b) phone the vet who prescribed these and ask how many ML of water to add say, 1ml of Baytril to.

When placed in the drinking water, I use a mouse sized Classic bottle as these seem easier to measure. But a larger bottle is fine as long as you have the graduated millileters down the side of the water bottle to be able to tell how much water is in the bottle. You just change the water daily and add the fresh baytril to it. Making sure he`s drinking a lot or he may not be getting the full dosage. That was one thing my vet was concerned about recently when I was dosing my elderly roborovski hamster, that it might dilute the baytril too much, but he drank it fine, even though the little guy passed away a week later. My concentration was 1ml baytril to 60ml water. But for a mouse, this could well be different, so you would need to discuss that with your vet and maybe quote what I said and see if they say that`s okay, or whether to add less or more.

Another trick is to take a very small piece of rich tea biscuit, dose the baytrl onto the broken end of the biscuit, let it soak in until almost dry and wait until he`s mooching for a treat and just lie the bicuit on a shelf and watch him from a distance to see if he eats it or just pick it up, has a nibble and then drops it again....as most mice do! :roll:

Hope this helps. x

_Nicola

The tea biscuit idea worked!

I think I've seen tubes of malt paste for cat's in pet stores before, I'll definitely try that as well :)

_lauren

Malt paste is a godsend! I usually do what ZT does and make a malt paste-medicine-biscuit sandwich. They're usually so excited by the malt paste, it gets gobbled down in seconds!

Alpro Soya vanilla yogurt/pudding can sometimes work too if they like sweet flavours :)