Autumn Worming Regime

As September draws to a close it is important to consider your horse’s worming routine, we always recommend Autumn as a good time to do a routine worm count and worm if necessary. But is there anything else you can do? 

Worm Count 

It's good practice to do a worm count coming into October if you haven’t already done one recently, and then worm only as necessary to avoid wormer resistance. With many horse owners changing paddocks this time of year getting ready for Winter routines, it marks a good time to ensure you’re in control of your worming regime and not entering Autumn with a worm burden. You can buy worm count kits online here, where you can simply take a sample and post it off for testing. 

Worm only if necessary 

Once tested, it’s a good idea to worm if results suggest it. A targeted worming programme is important for so many reasons: 

• Worming too regularly increases the change of your horse becoming resistant to the active ingredients used in wormers, marking them ineffective in the future. 
• Different wormers target different worms and so are suggested at different times of year – so making sure you’re targeting the right ones at the right time is so important – chat to us if you want to know more about this. 
• Small numbers of worms don’t actually pose a threat to your horse’s wellbeing. 
• It is much safer for your horse to only worm when necessary. 

Support their gut 

The potent active ingredients in wormers that make them effective at removing worms can sometimes cause a bit of digestive upset for your horse. We love using Protexin Quick Fix during these times of stress, it’s a highly concentrated probiotic paste flavoured with peppermint to maintain digestive function over periods of stress such as travel or worming.

Poo pick paddocks 

Endoparasites (worms) reach maturity in the gut, breed and then lay eggs in vast numbers, in excess of 80,000 eggs per day! These pass out with the faeces and infect pastures and, by ingestion, the horse. Regular poo-picking is not just to make fields look tidy it serves a serious task in removing worms from the field. Worm larvae remain on the faeces in the field so regular removal of faeces will significantly reduce the worm burden in the field and lowers the chance of your horse becoming infected. We sell plenty of poo picking tools to make this job as easy as can be. 

Rotate Grazing 

Rotating grazing seasonally is not only good for grass growth, but can also help with your worm control strategy. You can take it a step further by rotating your paddocks with other livestock; the main advantage of this is that different animal species are affected by different worms so a sheep will not be affected by horse worms and vice versa. That means when sheep graze the grass and ingest worms the worms can be killed as the sheep digests them without the sheep being infected. This will leave a lower worm burden in your horse’s field.   

Using these top tips will help you stay in control of your horse’s worming, don’t forget we have an SQP, so we are also able to sell wormers – please contact us if you need any help with your worming programme.