At various points in my cat’s life, I have been confronted with the unpleasant task of feeding her a pill. Cats are inscrutable demons whose motives are never quite clear; if I had to feed a dog a pill, I’d wrap it in a small nibble of cheese and toss it into its gullet. Though my cat Daisy is quite stupid, she is not so easily fooled.
The first time I had to give Daisy a pill, I was unsure how to proceed. A cat’s mouth does not open on command. Attempting to pry her tiny mouth open and toss the pill, encased in a Greenies Pill Pocket, down the back of her throat didn’t work; I felt stressed and she was stressed and so I turned to the internet for succor. This is how I discovered my favorite web page in the entire world.
Like most WikiHow pages, the entry on how to give an unwilling feline a small bit of medicine is blandly instructional, with solid advice on what to do in this scenario. The illustrations, however, are the real selling point. Due to image rights, I cannot in good faith use the photos that accompany the website. I will get around those pesky image rights by presenting this tweet that I made in 2016—roughly around the time I first discovered this information.
Look how calm these cats are, swaddled in their blankets, patiently awaiting their owners’ gentle ministrations. While I understand that these are fictional cats, it seems that they are already drugged? Who among us who owns a cat has been able to swaddle said cat in a blanket or towel and have that animal wait patiently for the pill you’re about to toss down the back of its throat? I have long dreamed of this type of cat—docile, patient, kind—and have been rewarded with a creature that is quite different. Having now mastered the art of popping her jaw open so that she resembles a viper, Daisy and I have reached a detente or sorts. When it is medicine time, she succumbs to the torture. As a small reward, I get to look at her teensy kitten teeth and marvel at how small they are. Also, she gets to eat her pill, and we both leave the experience unscathed. For this, I have WikiHow to thank.