fish oil

[Hobbes]

How do you give fish oil to your cats?
I tried to give fish oil/flax seed oil from Natural Factors, but my cat really hates it. He hissed at me when I tried to squeeze the capsul into his mouth, and he refused to eat anything with that oil in it.

[NRD]

I've got three guys and a girl, and I squeeze a teaspoonful of liquid fish oil, not a capsule, into their food every evening. The guys love fish oil even by itself,to the point that if I leave the bottle on the counter they will go over and lick it, so they may be more disposed to like it. Snowball has never been quite as enthusiastic an eater as the guys, but she, too, never has a problem with it. I add it to their wet food, to which I also add some water, and frankly I would have thought the flavor of the wet, usually turkey or chicken-based, would largely overwhelm the taste of the fish oil.

I don't know if you feed wet or dry, of course. Your guy might not like it because his first association with it was your force-feeding it into his mouth. My suggestion would be to use fish oil from a plastic bottle, which you refrigerate once opened. Start with just a drop or two mixed into his food. Let him adjust to that very small amount, then gradually increase it until you reach about a teaspoonful a day. Usually the very gradual approach allows them to adjust without hardly noticing it, although, as I said, my guys love it to begin with, so I didn't face your problem. However, the gradual approach has worked with other things.

[Hobbes]

Thanks for the advice. He must have had experience with it the first time. I will try to use the liquid one and mix in his wet food. Do you think the liquid one stored in fridge is fresher than the one from capsuls?

[NRD]

I don't know what capsules you are using, but in any case so long as they are not near their expiration date, they both should be fresh enough. I have found the refrigerated fish oil works just fine, and I have no problem using the whole bottle way before the expiration date.