Any worm counters around?

[Bojingles]

We had worm counts done on all the horses at our yard and a couple of results were really surprising. In particular, one cob mysteriously had a count of over 2000. The owner was understandably shocked but the technician said she's increasingly seeing this with horses that wear grazing muzzles. Has anyone else had this experience?

 

[SO1]

My pony wears a grazing muzzle and both his FEC worm count and tapeworm saliva test have come back as low and he always has a low worm count.

The only thing I can think of is that if they are wearing a muzzle and the grass is very short and the field is not poo picked so there are areas of long dirty grass where the poos are that the muzzled ones go for the longer grass as it is easier to eat with the muzzles on than very short grass.

The other option is if a pony become overweight and wormer does not get adjusted to take this into consideration and the weight has not been corrected estimated then they may not have been given enough wormer. Weight tapes are not that accurate so you always need to add 10% and round up to the nearest 100 kilos to make sure you give enough.

 

[CinnamonChristmasCookie]

Bordereiver on here works for a well known company who are also on Facebook, you could search for them to ask questions.

 

[Tobiano]

Aha - the comment about muzzled horses grazing the longer grass makes sense to me. In my horse's field all the poo is in the longest grass so if they eat that it must be higher risk.

 

[Ella19]

Some horses are just prone to a higher worm burden. It's not uncommon to have two in a field one with high worm count and the other none. Partially natural resistance, partially grazing technique and partially unknown why! As for muzzling no idea but the long grass idea sounds good.

My mare has low worm count but is a sand guzzler and has to have double dose psyllium in summer, whereas her field buddy is more susceptible to worms but has very little sand ingestion.

 

[soloequestrian]

It can also depend on the last wormer used - I saw some bizarre results during a project a while back where egg count was low to middling before worming, the yard then wormed (inexplicably) with a benzimidazole product and three weeks later a number of the horses had counts in the thousands. I never got a really good explanation, but my pet hypothesis is that the wormer was acting as a trigger that activated encysted eggs.

 

[ester]

It is completely normal for one or two horses in a herd to have much larger worm burdens than the others. Often it is younger or older members but not always.

soloequestrian- there are many many reasons why the first result could have been falsely low - such a small amount is sampled and distribution of eggs in faeces is not even unless you take 24 hours worth and mixed thoroughly .

I'm not sure I would read too much into the grazing muzzle situation, I suspect it depends on a lot of other factors and depends on the grazing.

 

[soloequestrian]

soloequestrian- there are many many reasons why the first result could have been falsely low - such a small amount is sampled and distribution of eggs in faeces is not even unless you take 24 hours worth and mixed thoroughly .
.

I'm confident it was a real result - there were about 12 horses in the study and about half of them showed the same pattern. We were doing the counts ourselves so method was consistent. If it had just been random, we should have seen at least one or two big burdens in the first test.

 

[ester]

It isn't just consistency of method though. I have done a lot of work on sheep FEC where you take 3 g of faeces from 10-50 sheep and 3 g is a lot more from a sheep dropping than a horse one, and then they were put in a food blender. Unfortunately people don't often go with my suggestion of a cement mixer to account for aggregation in a single horse's droppings even though funnily enough worms aren't producing eggs at regular intervals .

 

[Sealine]

Interesting theory re: muzzled horses eating longer dirty grass but it doesn't stack up to what I've seen with my horse. In the five years I've owned him his egg count is always 'no eggs seen' despite some other horses in the same field having much higher worm counts. We don't poo pick and I've seen him many time push dried poo out of the way with his nose to graze underneath it - disgusting beast! It always amazes me that he never has a worm count.

 

[soloequestrian]

It isn't just consistency of method though. I have done a lot of work on sheep FEC where you take 3 g of faeces from 10-50 sheep and 3 g is a lot more from a sheep dropping than a horse one, and then they were put in a food blender. Unfortunately people don't often go with my suggestion of a cement mixer to account for aggregation in a single horse's droppings even though funnily enough worms aren't producing eggs at regular intervals .

It's not really in the spirit of scientific investigation to write it off as a mistake though. If I had the facilities, I'd investigate further - what I saw makes perfect evolutionary sense: we select for worms that are activated by a wormer because they will do especially well in an environment with no competition.

 

[Polos Mum]

I have 4 horses on identical fields/ grass mgmt and 1 always has spring counts of 1500+ (despite regular worming for 6+ years and post count treatment and low counts to confirm it worked) I do think
1) worming youngster's establishes them for life
2) generally poorer horses (young, old, ill for other reasons) have lower immune resistance and so higher burdens
3) I wildly speculate with no evidence at all - whether individual horses stomach conditions (more or less acid than others) contributes to whether the eggs they pick up get through into their system

 

[flaxen]

My pony wears a grazing muzzle and both his FEC worm count and tapeworm saliva test have come back as low and he always has a low worm count.

The only thing I can think of is that if they are wearing a muzzle and the grass is very short and the field is not poo picked so there are areas of long dirty grass where the poos are that the muzzled ones go for the longer grass as it is easier to eat with the muzzles on than very short grass.

The other option is if a pony become overweight and wormer does not get adjusted to take this into consideration and the weight has not been corrected estimated then they may not have been given enough wormer. Weight tapes are not that accurate so you always need to add 10% and round up to the nearest 100 kilos to make sure you give enough.

My pony weighs less than the weigh tape says she does and i had her weighed at the vets on a weigh bridge.

 

[ester]

It's not really in the spirit of scientific investigation to write it off as a mistake though. If I had the facilities, I'd investigate further - what I saw makes perfect evolutionary sense: we select for worms that are activated by a wormer because they will do especially well in an environment with no competition.

I know, very correct which is why the worse thing to do is worm and move to clean pasture as you do get resistant worms making up the whole population.

Polos mum it is usual that most mature grazing animals will have low counts. I don't know whether those with previous damage due to non treatment are latterly more susceptible or not to higher burdens in later life.