Deworming recommendations

A lot has changed in the strategy of deworming programs.  Those of you who attended the February seminar heard quite a bit about the latest ideas.  Overuse of dewormers has lead to the development of resistant parasites.  Rather than waste money on wormers that may not be needed or effective, we are recommending strategic worming programs that are individualized for your particular horse and situation.   We hope to update this site soon with more specific information, but for now think about the following.  

Indiscriminate use of wormers leads to resistant parasites.  Different farms may experience different resistance depending on what has been used in the past.  We can get an idea of parasite burden and resistance with the use of fecal egg counts.  

Fecal Egg counts are just what it says.  We take a measured amount of horse manure and process it to come up with the number of parasite eggs in the sample.  This not only tells you if your horse has worms, it gives an idea of how many.  This test is best done as the weather gets warmer.  Those tricky parasites have figured out that producing eggs during the winter months is a waste of time. (Too cold  out to develop).  So doing the fecal egg count test in the middle of winter will not give a good picture of the parasite burden.  As the weather warms up the parasites go into production so that there will be a lot of parasite eggs on pasture as the horses begin to graze.  Spring is a good time to have a fecal egg count done.  

 We are now performing this test at the clinic.  The cost is $25.  When parasites are found, we recommend a followup fecal egg count (discounted to $20) 2 weeks after deworming to see if your wormer was effective.  In some situations, depending on the results and the situation, some horses may not even need to be dewormed.  

Feel free to contact us with questions regarding testing and worming your horses.