Homeopathic Remedies for Dogs & Cats 

By Begabati Lennihan, RN, CCH, Margo Roman, DVM, Shirley Moore

Animals respond really well to homeopathic remedies (it’s one way we know it’s not a placebo). But if you don’t shave any animals in your household, the following remedies will work just as well for people.

Stock up on the same remedies to make a great first aid kit for your household. The directions for administering the remedies to animals will be useful for giving them to small children as well: tuck a few pellets inside their mouth, or for infants, dissolve in water and dab on their lips or temples (not their paw pads!).

Both animals and people respond well to homeopathic remedies for chronic illnesses, however, these often require professional treatment to find the best individualized remedy. Search the directory at the American Holistic Veterinary Medical Association, www.ahvma.org.

First Aid Remedies 

For first aid, we use homeopathic remedies because they work so fast! You can get these in any natural food store or online, and it would be wise to keep the main ones on hand. (They’re not the same as herbal remedies—they look like little white pellets, and they come in a tube with a long Latin name. Here we’ll use their nicknames.)

When your pet is first injured, you’ll probably use one or all of these top remedies:

Aconite if your pet is frightened, for example, just hit by a car. We often give a dose of Aconite first while on the way to the animal hospital, then move on to…

Arnica for the actual injury—bruises, soreness, swelling from soft tissue trauma. Animals need Arnica a lot!

• Just fell from a balcony or deck
• Got into a fight with another animal
• Rambunctious running, slammed into something
• Birds that fly into a window or windshield

It will reduce the pain, swelling, and inflammation, and sometimes prevent a trip to the animal hospital. But if you’re not sure, don’t take a chance, get to the vet!

Calendula is for anytime the skin is broken, such as cuts, wounds, lacerations—let’s say your dog steps on broken glass and has a bleeding paw pad. Calendula prevents pain, infection, and scarring, and knits the sides of the wound together.

Story Time

A golden retriever came limping into Margo Roman’s office recently, having just been hit by a car. Margo instructed the owner to dissolve 3 pellets of Arnica 30c (the strength or potency) into 4 ounces of water, then put it into a sports bottle. The owner then squirted it onto the dog’s tongue and the affected leg and applied a cold compress. 

Within an hour the dog was walking just fine and seemed to be out of pain. Roman determined that further diagnostic tests and treatments were not necessary. 

Arnica saved the owner a lot of trouble—and a lot of money!

But of course, you should take your animal to an emergency animal hospital if there’s a possible broken bone or other serious injury. You can always give remedies on the way to the hospital. And you might need to make the remedy stronger. 

Basic Directions for Homeopathic Remedies 

You can put a few pellets onto your pet’s tongue. Food in the stomach doesn’t matter—you just want a clean mouth (nothing else in it). It’s okay to get them inside the cheek next to the gums. 

It’s not always easy to get the pellets in, though! So we use the squirt method, especially for dogs. Cats don’t like to be sprayed or squirted, so when my cat is asleep, I tuck the little pellet inside her lip. 

For larger dogs, you can use a sports bottle, for smaller dogs a syringe that you can get at any drug store—the kind used to give medications to babies. 

For homeopathic remedies, the bottle or syringe has to be clean and never used for any other remedy. For herbs and essential oils, it doesn’t matter—you can mix different herbs and oils in the same bottle—but homeopathic remedies need a clean bottle. 

The standard potency or strength is 30c, which is what you’ll find in any natural food store. The standard mixture is three or four pellets per four ounces of water; better not to use tap water if you have a choice. Distilled or spring is better. 

If you’ll be using it up right away, no need to preserve it. But if you want to keep it on hand, add a little clear alcohol such as unflavored vodka, or vegetable glycerin, available in drug stores.

So, once you have your mixture, you can squirt it into your pet’s mouth. If the teeth are clenched, it doesn’t matter, just as long as it touches the mucous membranes. If fact, if you can’t get it into the mouth, try applying it to the ears or paw pads—it will absorb through the skin. 

Quick Tip: Making it Stronger

In a real emergency situation, you need to make the remedy strong enough to keep pace with the intensity of the symptoms. Suggestions:

• Give it more frequently—every 15 minutes
• Success the bottle a dozen times or more, giving it hard whacks against the palm of the hand. 
• If you have an accident-prone pet, keep Aconite, Arnica, and Phosphorus on hand in a 200c potency.

Pre- and Post-Surgery

The same remedies are used for surgery as for first aid—plus another handy remedy:

Phosphorous is used both for the effects of anesthesia, and to control bleeding. (Use it for other bleeding situations too—nosebleeds or nails trimmed too short.)

Arnica helps control the pain after surgery, prevents bruising, and increases circulation to the surgical site to help your pet heal faster. 

Calendula closes the surgical incision, helps it heal quickly, and prevents infection and scarring.

Here’s another thing Calendula can do, in Roman’s experience—usually after surgery the whole digestive system shuts down, but Calendula gets it going again right away!

Even after spay surgery, Roman finds that painkillers usually aren’t necessary when using homeopathic remedies. That’s great, she says, because these conventional medications have side effects and can delay healing. 

Your pet’s comfort is the most important thing, though. Don’t hesitate to give painkillers if you can see that the remedies just aren’t strong enough. 

So, here’s what you do:

Give a squirt of Arnica into your pet’s mouth before surgery and bring Phosphorus for your vet to give during surgery. Explain that Phosphorus is to prevent bleeding and the aftereffects of anesthesia. 

Afterward, you need Phosphorus only if your pet is bleeding heavily or to reverse the effects of anesthesia if they are taking too long to wake up. Usually, you discontinue it and start the Arnica right after surgery. 

If there is lots of trauma after the surgery, use a higher potency of Arnica (200c is the next highest strength). 

Calendula is used afterward instead of antibiotics, unless there’s a lot of infection. It can be both squirted into the mouth and applied topically.

Bellis perennis is one more remedy to use: it’s special for abdominal surgery when the internal organs have been manipulated a lot.

Spay Surgery

Staphysagria is a special remedy to use after spay surgery—it’s an especially vulnerable area and an animal that is already frightened and insecure, such as a rescue animal, may feel traumatized after spay surgery. Staphysagria will help.

Dental Surgery

Silica is a remedy to use for gum irritation after dental surgery—in addition to our old favorites Arnica, Calendula, and Phosphorus, which prevent pain and swelling after an extraction. 

Hypericum, the remedy for nerve pain, is used if your pet seems to be in pain after a dental extraction. 

Use Calendula in a little water to rinse the mouth after dental cleaning or dental surgery. Hint: this also works for bad breath in dogs!

Orthopedic Surgery – Fractures, too!

Symphytum and Calc phos are the remedies we add when bones are involved. They reduce pain and speed healing by 30 percent. You’ll need to order these high potencies online:

Give Symphytum 200c once a day for three days, then Calc. phos. 200c once a day for two weeks, and make sure there’s adequate calcium in the diet. 

Ruta grav if the bone is bruised, when there seems to be lots of pain in the bone itself.

More Tips for Your Home Remedy Kit

Carbo veg has the amazing ability to promote oxygenation—in other words, it can help move oxygen from the lungs to the bloodstream to the cells. This could save your pet’s life! You can use it anytime an animal has difficulty breathing:

• Asthma
• Congestive heart failure
• Collapsed trachea
• Week, can’t resuscitate them

Wounds

Use Calendula, like we already talked about, to heal them up quickly without pain or infection. But—here’s the big BUT with Calendula—sometimes it works too well!

Let’s say it’s a bite wound or another deep puncture wound (stepped on a nail, for example). Calendula can heal the top layer of skin too quickly, while there’s still infection underneath. So, we don’t start with Calendula. We use Ledum instead, the best remedy for puncture wounds, until the wound can heal from the inside out.

First, clean the wound well with hydrogen peroxide to bubble out any debris or hair. (It’s really important to get hair out of the wound, because hair will prevent healing.) Then use Arnica for two days, Ledum for two days, then Calendula until it’s healed, all of them in 30c potency three times a day. 

If it’s a superficial wound, you can start applying Calendula topically right from the first day. For deep wounds—wait until the deepest part is healed.

Rescue Story

We had to do spay surgery on a 12-year-old dog. Normally, you would never do a spay surgery on such an old dog, but humane societies are required to spay or neuter all adult dogs prior to adoption. 

That same night, the dog was gasping for air and it looked like she was going downhill fast—I thought she was going to die. 

I put a few pellets of Carbo veg. on her tongue as there was no time to mix it up in water. It calmed her down right away and she stopped gasping, and this simple remedy saved the dog’s life.

—

Well Being Journal adapted this passage from A Healer in Every Home, copyright 2011 by GreenHealing Press.

Begabati Lennihan, RN, CCH is a Harvard graduate, using homeopathic remedies in Boston, and author of Your Natural Medicine Cabinet. Learn more at www.greenhealing.life 

Margo Roman, DVM, director at MASH, New England’s leader in veterinary care. Learn more at mashvet.com

Shirley Moore has saved thousands of rescue dogs with homeopathic remedies and holistic care at Save a Dog in Sudbury, MA. Learn more at saveadog.org.