Disclosure: there is one affiliate link below, to the chicken baby food we use. I bought it with my own money. If you buy through it I might earn a small commission, which costs you nothing and does not change what I write. The pet insurer I mention is not an affiliate, and nobody is paying me to name them.
It is 3am and I am reading the ingredients list on a jar of baby food. Not for a baby. For a 3.6 kilogram chihuahua who has decided that every tablet I own is a personal insult. This is roughly what my nights look like now.
This is the story of a diagnosis I did not see coming, a pet insurance policy I am extremely glad we took out, and the long, undignified road to giving a dog tablets when the dog in question treats medicine as a declaration of war. If you have a small dog who fires pills back at you across the kitchen, scroll to the food. I worked it out so you do not have to.
A 3.6kg dog with a heart murmur
Cujo is seven. He is a champagne long-haired chihuahua, he weighs about the same as a bag of sugar, and until this spring the most dramatic thing about him was his opinion of the postman. Then our vet heard a murmur where there had not been one before.
That got us a referral to a specialist veterinary cardiologist in Cheshire, and in March he had the full work-up. An echocardiogram, an ECG, bloods, and his own blood pressure taken with a little cuff on his tail. He came out with a diagnosis I had to read twice: moderate to severe mitral valve disease, stage B2. A grade four out of six murmur. On the clinic’s own severity score he landed at eight out of eleven.
In plain terms, one of the valves in his heart has thickened and started to leak, and it leaks badly. He is not in heart failure, and the whole point of the plan is to hold that off for as long as possible. He is on pimobendan twice a day on an empty stomach, and a benazepril and spironolactone tablet once a day with food. His blood pressure, for the record, is better than mine.
There is good news, and I will cling to it. At his April recheck the cardiologist said he had responded well and the disease was stable. We will take stable. Stable is the entire game with this.
Thank God we insured him
Here is the practical bit, and I will be blunt because nobody was blunt with me. Specialist cardiology is not cheap. Every time Cujo sees the cardiologist the bill lands somewhere between £850 and £1,400, and that is before the medication he now takes every single day. We insured him with ManyPets years ago, long before any of this, and it is covering the lot. Nobody is paying me to say that and there is no affiliate link on it. I just want to make the one point that mattered most to me at 3am. Insure the dog while he is well. Once a murmur is on his record it becomes a pre-existing condition, and after that no policy in the country will cover it. If you have a young, healthy dog and you have been putting insurance off, do it this week. I have never been so relieved about a monthly direct debit.
Giving a dog tablets: the four things we tried
So, the war. Cujo will not take a tablet. Not in cheese, not pushed to the back of his throat, not buried in anything with a texture he finds suspicious, which is most textures. Giving a dog tablets sounds like the simplest thing in the world until you meet a small dog who has decided otherwise. Here is the road we went down, in order, so you can skip the dead ends.
First, the pill pocket treats you buy on Amazon. Two problems. They are built for a labrador, so one pocket is roughly the size of Cujo’s head, which means feeding him three times his own tablet in filler. Worse, a lot of them are surprisingly high in salt, and salt was the one thing I was trying to keep away from a dog with a leaky heart. Out.
Next, tuna in spring water. He loved it. I was pleased with myself for about a day, until I actually read the tin. Even the spring water versions carry more sodium than I was happy giving him. Out.
Then sprats in spring water. Lower salt, he ate them, small victory. Then two things happened at once. My kitchen started to smell like a trawler, and Cujo developed the breath of a much larger and much worse animal. Suzy lodged a formal complaint. Out.
The baby food that finally worked, and the label you have to read
What actually works is baby food. Specifically, a chicken baby food where the only two ingredients are chicken and water. We use Holle, which comes as a pack of six little jars. I grind Cujo’s tablet down to a powder, stir it through a teaspoon of the chicken, and he hoovers it up like it is a treat rather than the medicine he has spent months refusing. No salt to speak of, no filler, no smell, no drama. I cannot recommend it enough, and after the sprats I do not use that phrase lightly.
One serious warning, and please do not skip it. You cannot just grab any baby food off the shelf. A lot of savoury baby foods, especially the meat dinners, contain onion or garlic, and both are toxic to dogs. The reason this one is safe is that it is genuinely just chicken and water and nothing else. Read the ingredients on the exact jar you buy, every time, because recipes change. If it lists anything from the onion family, put it back on the shelf.
I should say the obvious thing too. I am a bloke with a spreadsheet and a poorly dog, not a vet. Whether your dog needs its salt watched at all depends on how far the disease has progressed, and that is a conversation for your own cardiologist, not a blog. Ours has us being careful, so we are careful. Ask yours before you change how you feed or medicate a dog with a heart condition.
The number I count now instead of sheep
Regular readers will know I spend an unreasonable amount of my life measuring things. My own heart rate variability, my own blood pressure, my own sleep, all of it logged and cross-referenced at hours when sensible people are unconscious. It is the same joined-up-data habit I use on myself. There is a grim symmetry to the fact that the dog and I are now both under cardiologists, both getting our blood pressure taken, both watched by our own numbers.
For Cujo the number that matters is his sleeping breathing rate. You count his breaths while he is properly asleep, one rise and fall of the chest is one breath, and you want it comfortably under thirty a minute. It turns out a rising resting breathing rate is one of the earliest and most reliable signs that fluid is starting to gather in the lungs, often before the dog looks unwell at all. The vet schools explain how to measure it at home far better than I can. So every night, before I start on my own data, I sit and count the chihuahua’s breaths. Eighteen to twenty, most nights. I have never been so happy to be bored by a number.
Where we are now
So that is where we are. A seven-year-old dog with a serious heart condition, a stable set of numbers, a cupboard full of tablets, and a jar of chicken baby food that has quietly made all of it manageable. He is happy. He still comes everywhere with us, still convinced the campervan was built specifically for him. He is on the sofa as I write this, snoring, doing his eighteen breaths a minute.
The next cardiology review is due soon. I am braced for the bill but not for the news, because right now the news is fine. And if you are reading this at 3am because your own small dog has just been handed a diagnosis and will not take his tablets, I am sorry, and also: try the baby food, read the label, insure them before they are ill if you still can, and go and count the breaths. It is a strangely comforting thing to do in the dark.
About the author
I’m Pete Harrison. I’m 55, I run a business, and I have a mild case of insomnia that means I spend a lot of time at 3am reading about gadgets, gear and, lately, how to get a tablet into a chihuahua. Things I Learnt at 3am is where I write honestly about the things I’ve actually bought, tested and lived with. No fluff, no rehashing the spec sheet. Just the real verdict from someone who uses this stuff every day.
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