🐴One drug does not treat all when it comes to worms, your horse will need a worming programme targeted specifially for them affected by their genetics, lifestyle, age and the time of year.
🪱Approximately 80% of worms will be shed by only 20% of horses on a yard. Identifying and treating these high shedding horses means that low shedding horses shouldn’t need to be wormed on a regular basis particularly if you have good field management and regularly poo pick your fields.
🪱This is becoming more important as widespread resistance to worming drugs means that we can no longer simply use the same wormer types at the same times every year.
⚖️Whatever wormer you use, giving the correct dose is extremly important for preventing reactions to the medication and ensuring that worms with a small amount of resistance to the drug are not able to survive, using weight tapes or asking us to bring out weigh scales to your horse can make your dosing more accurate.
💩We can use a small sample of your horses faeces (a FWEC) to work out how many eggs are present in each gram of their poo. This gives us an idea of your horses worm burden. Juvinile worms and worms hibernating in your horses gut over winter will not produce so egg counts may be less accurate between late autumn and early spring.
💩Encysted redworms, pin worms, bot larvae and tape worms will not show up on a FWEC. For these worms there are specific tests we can recommend depending on your horses worming history.
This advice generally relates to adult horses, young horses ( below 4 years) are at high risk of picking up worms and require different management to adult horses. If you are concerned about worming please call the practice to discuss your worm control. We can provide a yearly tailored worm survalliance plan which can reduce the cost of regular monitoring of worming allowing us to give you personalised advice on worm control.
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