Counting your eggs before they hatch

We're taking a little break from elf training today. This post will not have pictures of any of your favorite residents, nor will it be of much interest to anybody who doesn't have horses or other equines in their life. But here's a little cartoon from shoeboxblog.com to set the tone.








We're here today to discuss fecal egg counts, anthelmintic resistance, and why I was scooping poop into carefully labeled baggies one morning this week.


Just a little background in case any non-horse owners have stuck around...
All horses are infected with internal parasites (think itty-bitty worms). These evil organisms lay their eggs in the horse's stomach and intestines. The eggs exit the horse's body in the manure, the manure lands on the ground, then the horse eats off the ground, giving the parasite a free ride back into the horse. It's one great big vicious cycle. Parasites can cause a whole host of health problems, up to and including death, so horse owners go to great lengths to keep their horses relatively free of these nasty critters. We scoop poop like there's no tomorrow, we try not to feed our horses on the ground, and we squirt chemicals, called dewormers, down their throats on a regular basis to kill off the parasite eggs before they hatch.

For as long as I've owned horses, I have followed my veterinarian's recommended deworming schedule. Every eight weeks, I've alternated squirting ivermectin and moxidectin into the boys' mouths. Hank politely cooperates, Lyle cooperates too much and always tries to eat the tube, and George and Alan stand quietly indignant throughout the procedure.

At Hank's and Lyle's annual check-up this fall, our vet recommended I throw out the old deworming schedule and instead consider fecal egg count testing to determine which, if any, dewormer to use and when to use it. I had been reading more and more articles recently about horses becoming resistant to certain dewormers, but what hadn't sunk in until my vet explained it was this: the pharmaceutical companies are not developing any new classes of dewormers to use if our horses become resistant to the current batch. "If we lose ivermectin," he said, "we're in big trouble." When he said he switched his own horses to this program, that was good enough for me. There would be no more willy-nilly deworming of my boys - we would start doing the tests, treat only the worms that were present, and greatly reduce the risk of my little herd developing a resistance to any of the dewormers.

Tuesday morning, I closed Hank, Lyle, George and Alan into their respective stalls and fed them breakfast. Then I waited for them to, shall we say, pass their part of the test. I scooped up one sample from each of them, while they stood around laughing and making crude jokes. I placed the samples in my never-to-be-used-again-for-my-lunch insulated lunch sack and merrily drove to town to deliver them to the vet.

All of the boys passed their fecal egg count tests with flying colors, so there's no need to deworm them now. Going forward, we'll do the test at the beginning of each season and deworm based on the results.

There's a wealth of information over at thehorse.com about fecal egg count testing and parasite control, but your veterinarian is your best source for what deworming program is appropriate for your horse.

That's enough scoop on poop for one week. We'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.