Oral dosing made easy
Medications, vitamins, wormers, all of these are necessary at some point or another or even routinely, in a llamas life. Some things are only available in the oral form, and some can be either oral or injectable. When given the choice we always choose oral, and within this choice there are two more choices, in their food or oral dosing. Obviously given the choice it’s in the food (we use a shredded beet plup/rice bran pellet combo), however that is not always a possibility: they may be too young to eat reliably or at all; the volume of the dose may be too large; It may be too unpalatable, or llamas tend to be suspicious of anything new and may only nibble until they get used to the flavor. So inevitably there will be times the oral dosing option is the only choice. We make it a part of a crias life giving oral Vitamin D, Vitamin E, and generally we need to treat Emac and use an herbal, Paravac, that needs to be given for at least 14 days, so as adults they are pretty used to the procedure, not to say they like it. A couple of things need to be pretty constant: a confined space so there is no dancing; The llamas neck needs to be erect and the head slightly tilted upward; your shoulder needs to be higher than the llamas jaw and you need a stable stance. To start, cradle the head, open the lips and touch the tongue with your index finger while you slip the syringe inside the jaw and alongside the tongue, you do not want to squirt it down their throat. Your finger on the tongue should trigger a lapping and swallowing reflex. Do not try to rush the process, give them time to keep up swallowing with no drooling or pooling inside the mouth. When the syringe is empty keep your finger in place until you are sure it has all been swallowed. With extremely large doses you may need to give it in 2 or more separate stages. CAUTION you do need to be aware of fighting teeth, and this procedure assumes they have been removed in the males and the females do not have them or they are very minimal. Hopefully the photos and captions will illustrate the explanations.