Your Vaccine and Wormer Protocol for Babies, please

[JB]

You can’t go by what is or isn’t in manure piles after you deworm.

Honestly, using fenbendazole (single or double doses?) at 2, 5, and 9 months, especially if only a single dose, is leaving a foal wide open to a major ascarid infection. Strongyles too - adults and encysted. Fenbendazole and pyrantel pamoate only offer protection for 4-5 weeks. Ivermectin is “good” for 8, and moxidectin good for 12.

Overworming is not the answer, I agree, but what might be “overworming” for one horse might be what it takes for another to be healthy.

[Hiddenacresmi]

What is the recommendation from the posters on how often and what to worm foals with?

[Sakura_Hill_Farm]

@Hiddenacresmi;4881637

What is the recommendation from the posters on how often and what to worm foals with?

Yes, please give us a clear, concise chart to guide us!

[JB]

I thought I did that in my first post

[stoicfish]

@feather river;4881483

I worm with Fenbendazole [panacur/safeguard] at 2, 5 & 9 mos. After that, they will get an ivermectin product at about 12 mos.

I think you need to be sensible, and the geography of every place is different both as to the area of the country [weather, seasonal temperatures, etc] and as to the prior use of your fields.

Small Strongyles, in my area and many others, are resistant to Fenbendazole. So It would mean the foal would go their first year with no strongyle deworming.
I do agree with the second part.

I can not tell anyone what they should do because it is location specific and this is just my opinion from what I read. But in western Canada, I rotate every other month between Ivermectin and panacur to catch everything and make sure there is not a build up.

The second link I posted has information. I think it is more important for people to make a educated decision for themselves as the consequences can be severe if you do not get it right. And FWIW, I have had vets give me bad advice about worming.

[ise]

I think you all should update yourself on parasite control in equines. There is a significant amount of new information and most indicates we are OVER WORMING HORSES.

We would NEVER worm foals every month. You should do fecals to see WHAT parasites any horse may have and then treat for that specific parasite.

[JB]

I don’t think anyone is advocating deworming foals monthly.

How often you deworm does depend largely, for foals, on the chemicals you use. If you ONLY used fenbendazole/pyrantel pamoate (which I am not advocating, as those do not target bots and dd fen doesn’t get tapeworms), then yes, you WOULD want to deworm monthly to have any hope of keeping things under control in an environment that can quickly become damaging to a foal’s underdeveloped immune system.

if you use ivermectin, then don’t do something else for 8 weeks.

I personally will not wait until a fecal shows there is an ascarid problem, as by then it could be quite large (see above re: foals’ underdeveloped immune system), so will target ascarids no less often than every 12 weeks - double dose fenbendazole or pryantel pamoate, 4 weeks later ivermectin, 8 weeks later the double dose again.

You also cannot see encysted strongyles or tapeworms (unless you get REALLY lucky) in a fecal, so that has to be taken into consideration too.

[ise]

This was an email I received from a friend who attended a recent lecture at Penn’s New Bolton Center:
I’m sending you the presentation (powerpoint) and the articles behind the presentation that I attended at New Bolten last week. It was really outstanding and a real eye-opener! Bottom line - if you have horses with low fecal counts, you should be de-worming only once/year and using only an ivermectin or moxidectin dewormer. Following the popular practice of every 8-12 weeks and rotating wormers each time is the worst thing you can do because it is speeding up the evolution of dewormer resistance and there are no new de-wormers coming to market anytime soon.

When you view the powerpoint, put it into “slide show” mode and page thru with your right arrow key because some of the slides have “motion” and sound effects. It may be a little tough to get all the meaning out of the slides because you won’t hear her narrative, but if you read the articles you’ll get the gist of it. Also the speaker (Dr. Nolen-Walston) wanted me to be sure and tell anyone that I sent this to that they should email her with any questions (her contact info is in the slides). She is a really wonderful teacher and full of knowledge about this subject!

Please share with everyone you can think of to spread the word about dewormer resistance before it’s too late!"

NOTE: If anyone on the COTH wants me to email them the “slide show” file - please PM me and I will forward the email to you. These findings were the result of extensive studies and I hope everyone will consider this information.

I’m old enough to remember when we used to tube worm horses 2x a year and we had far fewer issues with worms back in those days than we seem to have now with horses becoming resistant to wormers or encysted with worms.

[JB]

I have one problem:

if you have horses with low fecal counts, you should be de-worming only once/year and using only an ivermectin or moxidectin dewormer.

In nearly every place in the US, tapeworms are a big problem and horses really should be treated for them twice a year. You can do that and only use ivermectin/mox once a year by using a dd of pyrantel pamoate the other time to get tapes (and a bunch of strongyles along the way, though probably not all, which isn’t a problem for these horses), and then using Equimax or Quest Plus the other time, roughly 6 months apart.

A great thing to do is watch the Strategic Deworming webinar on www.thehorse.com (webinars are on the left side, towards the top).

[stoicfish]

[QUOTE=ise@ssl;4882198]
This was an email I received from a friend who attended a recent lecture at Penn’s New Bolton Center:
I’m sending you the presentation (powerpoint) and the articles behind the presentation that I attended at New Bolten last week. It was really outstanding and a real eye-opener! Bottom line - if you have horses with low fecal counts, you should be de-worming only once/year and using only an ivermectin or moxidectin dewormer. Following the popular practice of every 8-12 weeks and rotating wormers each time is the worst thing you can do because it is speeding up the evolution of dewormer resistance and there are no new de-wormers coming to market anytime soon.

When you view the powerpoint, put it into “slide show” mode and page thru with your right arrow key because some of the slides have “motion” and sound effects. It may be a little tough to get all the meaning out of the slides because you won’t hear her narrative, but if you read the articles you’ll get the gist of it. Also the speaker (Dr. Nolen-Walston) wanted me to be sure and tell anyone that I sent this to that they should email her with any questions (her contact info is in the slides). She is a really wonderful teacher and full of knowledge about this subject!

Please share with everyone you can think of to spread the word about dewormer resistance before it’s too late!"

NOTE: If anyone on the COTH wants me to email them the “slide show” file - please PM me and I will forward the email to you. These findings were the result of extensive studies and I hope everyone will consider this information.

I’m old enough to remember when we used to tube worm horses 2x a year and we had far fewer issues with worms back in those days than we seem to have now with horses becoming resistant to wormers or encysted with worms.[/QUOTE]

Did they say foals included? There is some great webinars on The Horse about over worming but they are not extended to foals. Not that a foal cannot be over wormed but they have different requirements than a horse over 18 months. Just to make your information clear.

[ise]

I wasn’t at the lecture but I’m sure if you contacted the author she will respond. We’ve been breeding for 24 years and we DO NOT worm foals until they are at least 3 months old. We used to start a regular worming schedule at 6 months - but we will be changing our schedule to the new recommendations. We do fecals if we think we have a problem.