From: Vanessa
Dear Jessica,
My horse was just diagnosed with EPM, and my vet has him on a good sixty pills each day. This is probably going to be the silliest question ever, but these pills are *impossible* to crush in a mortar and pestle - they're pink, solid as rocks, about 3/4 inch long and almost half an inch wide - I don't know how many I wasted as they ricocheted in a million different directions around the feed room. Why do they make these things this way? Isn't a sick horse enough to deal with? But the screaming and crying, I think, was very theraputic. Good thing it was late at night. :)
I am incredibly stressed out and upset about my horse - it adds insult to injury that I can't grind the darn pills. Last night, I spent some three hours hand-feeding him forty-two pills (he's such a good boy), but !!!!!
I would very much appreciate your suggestions - and so would the rows of mortars and pestles that stand trembling on the feed room shelf, mourning for their fallen comrades. ;)
Thanks, Vanessa
Some pills dissolve easily in a small amount of water, and the resulting liquid can then be added to the horse's feed if he doesn't object to the tast, or mixed with applesauce or yoghurt and administered with a syringe like the ones used for paste dewormers. If you clean one or two of those after you deworm, and put them in your medical kit, they're helpful in situations like this one.
Some pills don't dissolve easily, and do need to be pulverized, but the idea is to reduce them to powder WITHOUT breaking into tears, losing half the pills on the feed room floor, inhaling the dust, or developing repetitive motion injury. That's not a joke - using a mortar and pestle to grind a lot of hard pills every day is physically stressful as well as emotionally frustrating.
The easiest and safest way I know to pulverize pills is to put them in a coffee-grinder. You can buy an inexpensive electric one for $15 or so, and it makes the entire pill-smashing chore infinitely easier and safer. d as long as you mark it (or keep it in the barn) so that it doesn't get mixed up with the one you actually use for your coffee. ;-)
Once you've got the powder, you can proceed as above, with syringe and applesauce or whatever your horse will accept happily. Since you'll be giving your horse a lot of pills for a long time, you may as well make this process as easy and pleasant as possible for both of you.
Good luck!
Jessica
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