Re: Ivermectin wormer
This message is from: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gayle, They recommended worming every 60 days. We lived in MT at the time. With the hard killing frosts in the winter and our pasture management of rotating, dragging and leaving pastures vacant for a while, worming every 3-4 months was quite sufficient. I wondered why the need for worming so often? Deworming every 6-8wks is standard protocol for wormers based on the life cycle of the parasites. However, with your respectable management practices and climate, you're right. Deworming every 3-4 months (if even that often) is sufficient. Most people don't manage that well or do not have the acreage to be able to rotate pastures, and so the companies have to suggest the 6-8wk protocol. He had a HUGE infestation of ascarids. I picked out some of the larger ones and froze them so that I could show his owner. Fortunately no one mistook this for some left over pasta. Seriously though, it could be that the person didn't do as they claimed, or didn't do it effectively. Or maybe you just have some very tough ascarids in your area. My point is, Jean, that this is nothing new, it just never did work like they advertised! Shame on them!! I must disagree with you here. It was a terrific product and still works well. It has prevented a lot of deaths in young horses from verminous arteritis (when small strongyles cause damage to the vessels in the gut). If you are not using ivermectin in foals and yearlings, you may be risking them to this condition. Ascarids are not a major concern. When a horse has a lot of them, they can cause unthriftiness and sometimes a blockage in severe cases, but they don't cause any of the damage that the strongyles can. So the moral here is use ivermectin, but rotate it with other classes to get the variety of parasites. And if possible, practice good management like Gayle does with rotating pastures, cleaning up manure piles, etc.. Steve Steve White, DVM Sport Horse Veterinary Service Gretna, NE
Ivermectin wormer
This message is from: [EMAIL PROTECTED] In a message dated 12/10/03 6:17:35 AM Pacific Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Jean, I feel a need to respond to your post regarding the Ivermec wormers. When this product first came onto the market, I was a bit skeptical with the manufacturer's claims regarding it's efficiency, etc. They recommended worming every 60 days. We lived in MT at the time. With the hard killing frosts in the winter and our pasture management of rotating, dragging and leaving pastures vacant for a while, worming every 3-4 months was quite sufficient. I wondered why the need for worming so often? I was glad to have a new product for rotational worming, so gave it a try. HOWEVER, I found that after the 60 days, the horses began to drop weight! HMMM! I began to suspect that that product was NOT doing what the manufacturers were touting! They were saying that Ivermectin cleaned out the worm population better and that there was no resistance build up so it could be used all the time rather than rotating. HMMM! No wonder it had to be used every 60 days! I quickly gave up on the notion that this was the latest WONDER WORMER! I continued to use it once in the fall and late winter to get rid of bots, but went back to rotating wormers the rest of the year. Then I began seeing articles about the devastating effects using only Ivermectin was having on young horses. I found from hands-on experience, that it did NOT kill ascarids in youngsters as the manufacturer said! Ascarids plague youngsters under 2 years of age. I found that after they reached about 2, they seemed to have a resistance to those. A prime example was a young Arab that came to me for training. He just did not look thrifty. When I asked the owner about their worming program, they proudly announced that this fellow had been wormed with Ivermectin faithfully every 2 months since he was born. H! I decided to worm him with something different. OH MY GAWD!! You can't imagine what came out of that poor fellow!!! He had piles of poop that looked more like a bowl of cooked spaghetti! He had a HUGE infestation of ascarids. I picked out some of the larger ones and froze them so that I could show his owner. Some of them measured 12 long! SO MUCH FOR IVERMECTIN'S CLAIMS! I often wondered why the company hadn't been sued by owners of foals that were dying because folks believed the manufacturer's claims! My point is, Jean, that this is nothing new, it just never did work like they advertised! Shame on them!! Gayle Ware Field of Dreams Eugene, OR www.fjordhorse.com
