Mares midway in their second trimester makes them a top parasite control priority on horse farms. It is important to consider all the horses on the farm, but remember each horse has its own needs , writes Sarah Evers Conrad. Avoid blanket parasite control strategies. They have led to widespread drug resistance in parasite populations.
There’s really no way to build a parasite control program without using fecal egg counts (FEC) according to Martin Nielsen, DVM, PhD, Dipl. ACVM.
Source: The Horse, July 2018. Link. Horse owners currently use three drug classes to fight parasites: benzimidazoles (e.g., fenbendazole and oxibendazole), pyrimidines (pyrantel salts such as pyrantel pamoate and pyrantel tartrate), and macrocyclic lactones (e.g., ivermectin and moxidectin alone or combined with praziquantel).
The goal of any parasite control program, says Nielsen, is to reduce the level of egg shedding in your herd to, in turn, reduce pasture contamination and parasite infection. “There’s no big broad-spectrum, umbrella-type product anymore that we can just give and know it gets everything in the horse. There’s also not any product that we can just discard and kick out and never use anymore, he said.”
INSIGHTS: Share this article with horse owners directly, on social media and in newsletters. It as important for those with two or three horses as those with barns full. Dealing with resistance is challenging and time consuming. Blanket deworming without a strategy for each horse could leave us with nothing to control equine parasites.