Quick ques about worming....

Depends on how long between worming and moving? I would worm before moving IF the move was more than say 2 / 3 days later , if not then I would move and then wait a week for them to settle in a new place before worming - no point in worming if the horse is unsettled as he/she will probably pooh most of the wormer out .
 
We always worm before we move and dont turn out on the old after worming (let it rest) but recent articles I think in Horse and Hound or another magazine have suggested this is the wrong way to do it as you build up a concentration of the untreated worms (if there are any) in the new fields and build up resistance to wormers as there is no competition for the worms left..... or something like that if that makes any sence at all!
 
You should move the horse and then worm. The reason is that when you worm, the wormer will kill off all the worms that are not resistant to it. You may be lucky, and have no resistant worms, but the chances of this are very slim. If there are resistant worms present, they will have all their competitors in the horse removed by the wormer, go into a huge population increase and shed mainly resistant eggs onto pasture. So if you worm the horse, then move it onto clean pasture, the ONLY egges that will be present on that pasture will be resistant ones. If, however, you allow a burden of non-resistant eggs to build up on the pasture first, the horse will reinfect itself with a mix of resistant and non-resistant and so the resistant worms in the gut will have competition, not be able to monopolise all the resources, and will not have a population surge. This means that wormers will stay functional for longer. There are already massive problems with benzimidazole resistance, and the other worming compounds will catch up with time whatever we do, but there are means to slow progress towards the inevitable future when worms are resistant to every compound we currently have, and this is one of them.
It's also probably not that healthy for horses to have no worms at all - a bit like clean kids and asthma, they may be more prone to autoimmune conditions such as RAO, so check the worm burden before you do anything at all with wormers!
 
I always worm 2-3 days before moving to new field as i dont want any worm burden taken and dumped into the new field and eaten up!
 
I now never worm before moving due to having lost horses to grass sickness. I never use ivermectin based wormer either for the same reason. I only worm when the worm count says they need it so far the horses have only been wormed twice in my ownership and not for a long time. recent worm count came back very low count. I do pick up the droppings from the paddocks 3 or 4 times a week. My vet recently told me its pointless worming in this warm weather as the worms in the pasture are inactive until after resonable amount of rainfall and cooler weather. In the winter it was too cold for the worm eggs to become active too. I wont be doing another count now til autumn and i expect that to be low as i collect the droppings so theres minimal eggs on the grass anyway.
 
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