Worm counts..

[celia]

How accurate are they?

Over the last couple of years we've gradually made a shift from regular worming to dosing for tape and encysted annually and then having worm counts in between. We poo-pick regularly and our three are kept in a field together at home. Usually the counts are all fairly low but our last one has come back with two of them low but one very high - 2000 e.p.g.

There were other horses grazing this field before we moved ours in to it - who are not regularly wormed - so this is probably as a result of this. But this has made me wonder why the other two are not also high? They have had the same worming routine and are kept together. Do some horses just randomly end up with more worms? Or is it possible that the boys have just as many but they haven't been in the bit of dung tested??

Very confused! Will be worming mare and having another egg-count done but am wondering whether to do the boys as well. But then surely that defeats the point of the worm count!! Any advice would be fab as am currently very confused! Thank you.

 

[coss]

if i were you, i'd email westgate labs (or whoever did your worm count) and ask for their advice. It does seem a bit odd but different horses have different grazing/poohing methods, my two won't eat near where they've poohed and have areas making mucking out easier and i think they are at less risk that way too ??

 

[CMMB]

The others are low because their immune system is coping very well and they are managing their own worm burdens. The high one could be a dip in immunity (another low lying illness??) or you have one of the 20% of horses that continually have high egg counts no matter what. The rule of thumb is 20% of horses will contribute 80% of the worm burden on a pasture.On our field the gelding always has a count above the threshold for worming, the two mares next to nothing. So he gets wormed wghen necessary, the other two get dosed once in winter.

 

[celia]

Thanks for the replies. I'm probably worrying for no reason - something I seem to do a lot! It's only in the last year or so that I've finally felt confident with our worming routine - it's the kind of thing everyone seems to have an opinion on + it's so important you don't want to get it wrong - so this just sent me back into 'am I doing the right thing?' mode! I always assume when something like this happens that's it's something I've done wrong rather than something which just happens regardless.

Will get some wormer bought asap and hopefully she'll be back to normal soon.