How do you keep those nasty parasites at bay? A regular deworming process is necessary to rid your horses of dangerous, and sometimes deadly nasties such as large strongyles, small strongyles, ascarids, bots, pinworms, intestinal threadworms, and summer sores.
Of course, sometimes deworming is easier said than done! It’s one thing to come up with a regular deworming schedule, and quite another to put it into practice. First of all, your deworming schedule should be unique to your circumstances. What agent you use, and how often, will depend upon things such as geography, time of year, how many horses you have, size and type of pasture, amount of turn-out time, etc. It can be complicated! To add insult to injury, once you come up with a schedule you’ll have to get your horses to accept the deworming process. While some horses have no issues with deworming, others can make it quite difficult on you!
One aspect of deworming that is easier today than it was long ago, is the availability of commercial dewormers. Now it’s as easy as walking into your local tack or feed shop and buying the dewormer of your choice. Best of all, these dewormers are effective. Back before you could buy dewormers right off the shelf, horse owners tried a wide variety of things to control parasites. Concoctions that included things like wood ash and tobacco were routinely fed to horses to stave off parasites.
Someone got smart and invented the first deworming agents, but these were not nearly as effective as what is available today. Many of these controlled only a couple of types of parasites, or had nasty side effects. Others wore off as parasites grew resistant to them. The worst thing about these early dewormers was how they were administered. Many of these compounds were delivered by stomach tube, injection, balling guns, or metal syringers. The average horse person like you or me had no business deworming their horses! Deworming was best left to the professionals, like veterinarians.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and nowhere is this more true than in the horse world. Since most horse owners didn’t want to call the vet out every time their horses needed to be dewormed, a formula was developed that could be mixed into feed. This was the perfect solution—in theory, that is. In actuality horses who didn’t eat all their feed were compromised, not to mention those horses who were very talented at eating around the compound. Back to the drawing board!
Lucky for you and me, paste dewormers came along. In comparison to historical methods of deworming, paste dewormers are fairly easy to use, reliable, and kill a broad range of parasites.
Of course, our horses will never make deworming completely easy. They have to keep us on our toes, after all! To that end, there are some tricks to the trade of administering paste dewormer.
First of all, make sure your horse has no food in his mouth. Position yourself so you and your horse are facing the same direction. You should be standing in front of the horse’s shoulder, and his head should be over your shoulder. Place one hand over his nose, and gently insert the syringe into the side of his mouth, behind the incisors and canine teeth and in front of the cheek teeth. Push the plunger and deposit the dewormer on the tongue. Don’t let your horse put his head down! Hold his head horizontally until he swallows the paste.
Now, chances are you are going to have at least one rogue horse who gives you a hard time. Whatever you do, don’t get into a big fight with him over the dewormer! Instead, patiently play with your horse’s mouth until he is distracted and accepts the tube.
At what age should a horse be put on a deworming program? About five weeks of age is usually the norm. However, before you put any horse on a deworming program, speak to your veterinarian. As mentioned before, there are lots of variables that will determine your facility’s deworming program, and a professional is best qualified to help you figure out the most effective plan.
Ron Petracek - Idaho Raised Horseman, Equine Article Directory HorseChitChat.com
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