Parasite Control for Performance Horses
Are you maximizing your horse's health to maximize the number of visits to the Winner's Circle? What you can't see can harm your horse's chances of the perfect clear round and keep you from claiming those blue ribbons. Get your horse on top with optimum health countdown to competition success with targeted worm control and reach your goals this show season by getting a leg up on the competition.
Horses that are being transported, competing, or in training tend to have higher egg counts, but not necessarily due to higher parasite burdens. More likely, these horses have weaker immune responses due to stress, which allows the parasites they already have to produce more eggs. Therefore, run fecal egg counts on any transient horse or horse in training at least twice a year. If one becomes a high shedder, you can change his treatment regimen.
Improve Your Horse Power With Targeted Parasite Control.
Performance horse breeders, owner, and trainers are well aware of the term Selective breeding in determining what stallions they should breed their mares to that will hopefully improve the filly or colt's ability to perform.
However, do they realize that each time they deworm their horses they are Selectively breeding the horses' parasites by killing all the sensitive parasites leaving only the resistant parasites to mate with each other and produce more resistant parasites. This is exactly how we have arrived where we are concerning the rapid development of resistant parasites to the dewormers we have available to control parasites.
Why do fecal egg counts on your horses before deworming?
Because there is a devastating crisis developing. Parasite Resistance!
You ask where are we concerning resistance? There are 3 classes of dewormers. Small strongyles (most common parasite found) when doing fecal egg counts show considerable resistance to 2 of the classes. Roundworms and pinworms are showing some resistance to the third class of dewormers. Therefore, often a combination of dewormers need to be used when more than one species of parasites are present.
Doing fecal egg counts on horses and using the results to determine when to deworm and which horses need to be dewormed can reduce the parasite population's exposure to dewormers. This reduction of exposure to dewormers appears to be the largest factor in reducing the speed with which resistance to the dewormer develops.
Once resistance has started to develop on one farm or stable these resistant parasites are quickly and easily spread to other farms and stables as horses travel to other farms and stables. Also, once a population or parasite develops resistance they never revert to being sensitive to that medication thereby making it useless to use against that strain of parasites forever.
By using Horsemen's Laboratory's Equine Fecal Egg Count Testing Kit you will be able to determine the types of parasites (if any) have infected your horses. We will also provide a suggested treatment for those specific parasites, enabling you to enhance the health and performance of your horses.
