I do similar but with Avon Skin So Soft as the oil. It works fine. No better or worse than commercial stuff for me.
Question for all you horse care givers … do you ever wonder about the overspray/ blowback from the daily squirt squirt squirt we do on on horses trying to give them relief? Sometimes when the wind shifts and I get a faceful… I think F@$k me …. That’s not good.
Oh, I think about it. But I am long past caring. The cancer that I have may or may not be from fly spry. But, I tend to think not.
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I just wonder. A long horse life is 30 years. I’ve been spraying my ponies with insecticide since I was 8. I’m 52. Just a thought.
Lol yes I pause for a bit too. And then think about all the Furacin and DMSO and whatever else I’ve touched bare handed and am like, eh, if I live long enough, I’ll probably have some kind of cancer no matter what. I also think some of my cookware has gone toxic, and I like almost burned bacon. And I used to make horse’s socks gleam with baby powder back when I was a groom and no one knew it caused cancer too. And pretty much the only water I drank as a kid came from a garden hose. So I figure what’s a bit of fly spray (so long as it’s not Ecovet because I feel like I’m dying on the spot). 
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I thought about this recently because my friend was in town with her 9-year-old girls, who take lessons at home and were really excited to groom my horses. Part of their grooming ritual is apparently to douse the horses with half a bottle of fly spray. (I was like, “Okay, that’s probably enough!” while I’m thinking to myself, “This shit costs money, kiddos, and it probably doesn’t even do anything!”) It made me wonder if the instructors at their barn ask parents if it’s okay for kids to be handling chemicals. It probably wouldn’t even occur to non-horsey parents that that might come up.
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Flick’s is the BEST! And it smells good!
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I try to spray my horse away from water buckets. But being in a boarding situation, I worry about all the boarders that douse their horses in the aisle and the overspray gets blown into the water buckets.
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After seeing your response, I decided to experiment with Ecovet all over (not just legs/lower body). That does seem to be more effective than my combo. Just $$$.
Also, my one mare who gets garlic seems to do slightly better than the one who does not.
At least here the only fly spray I can routinely say is better is Ecovet. All the others I honestly don’t see a tremendous difference from fly spray to fly spray. None of them (including Ecovet) are as effective this year as prior. We see to have more flies and more aggressive flies. But Ecovet does perform better for me than the other types of sprays. The Vectra appears to have made literally no difference.
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One nice side effect of the COVID pandemic is that I always have disposable masks around. I hung one from the spray bottle of Ecovet and put it on when I’m spraying.
I take the mare outside to spray her. She used to get wiggly, but now she just ground ties while I spray it, and usually give her an Outlast treat when I am done. She does not like any spray around her face, so the only area that’s difficult is her poll. I try to really soak that area by holding the sprayer up against her skin. I also spray her riding flay mask’s ears with it.
Oh, I have a question. A week ago, some sort of fly must have hatched and they were swarming the horses in their paddocks so badly that the barn workers brought them in early. They look like small deerflies. There were up to a hundred on each horse, they landed and stayed put and bit hard, and it was just too much. The barn has some sort of insect control so very few got into the barn. My mare had one land on her right hind pastern while she was in the barn aisle, and she stomped about 10 times before it let go.
The next day, they were gone.
Anyone have an idea what these were? I’m on the North Shore of MA. Not greenheads, not deerflies.
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The best thing that I ever did for flies is allow my chickens access to my manure piles and stalls. They eat all the maggots that hatch and we have very few flies this year.
Now horse flies are a different story.
Anyone have a go to for preventing them. My one dark bay gelding is tortured by them and he gets treat with Freedom 45 (every two weeks), Pro force fly spry and Deet before he goes out.
I still stand by my Smartpak Out Smart suggestion. I tried the Ecovet based on this thread, and it just doesn’t last in this hot and humid weather we have in the summer. And too, if the horse is sweaty (every afternoon/evening in August here), you can’t apply it. Sticking with my Out Smart.
I use sprays with Cypermethrin and Permethrin.
They say “up to 14 days”. Yeah, the key is “up to”. They don’t last one or two days in hot and humid weather.
Tonight, I was grooming and spraying my horse out in his pasture (stepped on his clip shoe, lame). So I tried directly spraying horseflies. The black-headed flies the size of the green-headed flies (haven’t seen them before but hey, we had no hard frost and flies o’plenty this year) - when sprayed, they fell over backwards into the grass. Who knows if it was the chemicals or just the direct liquids. Cool. B52’s? Were annoyed and flew off great distances. The relief seemed to come with gnats on his legs and belly. Other horseflies and B52s landed and took off more than usual. I was there to smash them if I could and I don’t know if they would have successfully landed and pierced skin if I was not there. Within 15 minutes of flyspraying.
I have such little faith in flyspray. I feel like I want to write a litter telling companies like Endure and Tri-Tek to just drop their claim that it works “up to 14 days”. That’s so unrealistic!
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@J-Lu This is my experience with fly sprays as well. I’m not sure why I keep using them, except for the fact that I feel guilty if I don’t. I sure spend a lot of money on sprays that don’t work - and none of them work for more than a very few minutes.
The 14 day claim is a joke. I would be happy with 14 hours, but that is not the case either.
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