Worming advice please!

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happihorse

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I keep my two horses (competition horse and companion pony) at home. There are no other horses within a mile or so of our site and my horses are never allowed to graze anywhere other than our yard. The competition horse has a two acre paddock and only goes out for a couple of hours a day. The pony is on restricted grazing during the summer (and poo picked daily) and is on a two acre paddock (different to the one above) during the winter which is harrowed in the spring and rested over the summer.

I have always followed a strict worming plan, worming twice a year with Panacur Equine Guard, twice a year for tapeworm and then every six or eight weeks throughout the summer (each year rotating the active ingredient). I have done this because I thought it was the right thing to do. However, I have been reading up on it more recently and wonder whether I really need to be worming my horses this much - it seems far too excessive!

I had a worm count of each horse done a couple of years ago and my horse came back with a nil count and the pony had a low count (50 I think).

Based on the above, what worming programme would you recommend?

I was thinking about doing an egg count every three months to check their worm burden and I know I still need to work for tapeworm, but how often? Should I also still do the five day course of Panacur Equine Guard to ensure they don't have any encysted (sp?) round worm?

I know there is a company (Intelligent Worming) who provide this service, but I really don't want to pay any more than I have to!

Sorry for all the questions but I am concerned about how many chemicals I am pumping into them and realise that resistance is becoming such a problem.

Please help!

Thank you in advance.
 
Mine are in a similar situation, although out 24/7 (perhaps you could reconsider your stabling habit too?!). They get wormed once a year for tapeworm, and have random egg counts the rest of the time. This year I used a double dose of pyrantel for the tapeworm because it acts as a broad spectrum wormer too.
I think your plan sounds very sensible, and you could talk to your vet about having the egg counts done. You could go the whole hog and have a tapeworm antibody test done too, although you need the vet to take a blood sample for this so it can work out expensive. If you discovered you had no problems with any sort of worm, you could skip the chemical wormers altogether.
There is a lot of hype about encysted redworm, however my view is that if there are only a few or no adults present through the summer months, it would seem very unlikely that there would be many encysted larvae over the winter. I know the whole encysting thing is a bit mysterious, but it would seem odd for a large number to stay encysted for more than one winter......

Have a look at:
http://www.liv.ac.uk/diagnosteq/
http://solo-equestrian.blogspot.com/2008/07/worms-and-worming-new-thinking.html
 
You sound as though you have an ideal situation for running a programme based on counts and reducing worming doses to the minimum. As you will be aware some worm eggs don't show reliably in counts but it's easy to sort out to cover for them.

Send me a pm if you need help. I'm an SQP and help hundreds of people with this kind of programme every day. It can cost as little as about £40 for your years programme doing it this way (though may be more if you need extra doses to start with).
 
Thank you all for your most helpful replies! It's just what I needed - it is such a minefield trying to find the right thing to do.

Looks like I will save a fair bit of money too!
 
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