Equine Parasite Management

Reexamined...

Apr 29, 2023

Yin and Yang is a Chinese philosophical concept that describes opposite but interconnected forces. This is very similar to the Rule of Opposites in Cherokee Medicine.

This is a major update to the article I wrote in 2011 entitled,” The Yin and Yang of Poop!”. Or, what may be inside of it on a microscopic level. The idea to write it, originally, came to me from a holiday party among horse owners talking mostly about hay and poop. Of all the things we do caring for our horses, these two items consume a sizable segment of our “horse” time and, at times more than the horses themselves, especially if we have collected a few of them.

Parasite management is an essential question I ask in my Information Form each new client must fill out before our first appointment. Is the horse regularly “dewormed” and with what? What has become a tradition in my lifetime is slowly being challenged by holistically minded Veterinarians and people, but many conventional Veterinarians, barn owners, managers and horse owners are still hanging on to it. The “it” is using chemicals to “deworm” horses either daily, on regular intervals and/or based on fecal egg counting. I’m going to take you on my professional learning journey and how this unfolded by observation, experience and research.

As a young girl working at a riding stable as a trail guide, I would sometimes walk the trails and fields with Mrs. B, the owner. She would always have a walking stick and sometimes as we walked, she would poke the manure piles and inspect them. She would point out which horse it belonged to, and if it was normal or not. Now, back in those days if you saw something wiggling around upon inspection you didn’t run down to the feed store and buy a paste wormer for your horse. These things did not exist. If your horse had worms that you could see, he/she was pretty bad off and usually thin. Worming was done by the Veterinarian with a long tube sent down the horse’s nose with a funnel added to the other end, and a bottle of piperazine was poured into it and sent directly into the stomach. Some old timers I knew back then would give their horses tobacco as an antiparasitic. I still hear from people about their parents or grandparents using it for their horses. Almost always, the horse got better, and this was something that was rarely done. It wasn’t until the 1980’s that the barn I managed considered using paste wormers for horses. They were new and expensive, so again, used rarely.

Now we are in a time where you can purchase a tube of generic ivermectin for around $10.00 ($2.00 when I originally wrote this article). Magazines, feed stores, advertisements and catalogs, as well as online sites, sell a vast array of different chemical products to “deworm” your horse and encourage regular rotational administration as a preventative as well as a pelleted daily form. The ease and affordability of these drugs (yes, they are drugs), I believe, gives the horse owner the sense of taking good care of their horse, but also provides a false sense of security. No one ever talks about the possibilities of any “side effects”, and most generally will not recognize it if their horse exhibited one or possibly more, unless it was dramatic. Possible side effects are listed in the folded paper in the box the tube came in, but most pay no attention to it. After all, the Vet, the barn manager, the trainer and other boarders recommend it and give it to their horses, and all goes on as normal. Or does it? Or perhaps the better questions may be, would we notice or make the connection if it didn’t?

I attended a workshop at SUNY Cobleskill a few years before I started to look into holistic care. The event was sponsored by Pfizer and Purina Feeds. The morning segment was on “Parasitology”. What the cycles of different species of parasites were, how they affect the horse, etc. We got to see what eggs and larva looked like in a microscope, and in the end the recommendation was a blanket one for everyone there. Put your horse on a small dose of daily Strongid and deworm in the Spring and Fall with Equimax paste wormer. It has the most effective dose of praziquantel for killing tape worm eggs- 14% as opposed to the “other brand” that only had 7%. I bought into it, and did it for a few months on one horse. He gained a lot of weight, too much weight in fact, and eventually had a bout of laminitis. Now, I am not attributing the chemicals as the sole cause of the laminitis, but I was to learn later as I worked through my Equine Sciences Degree that it was one of the “straws on the horses back” with respect to gut health.

In the field, a large part of my work is rehabilitative. Gathering history on a horse often reads as a litany of exposures and treatments with chemicals and drugs. Worm medicines are drugs, remember? Everything stressful that happens to the horse is almost always recorded in his hooves. Those rings you see in the hoof wall mark events that tipped the balance of health. If you see these lines or rings close together, and some appear to be deeper or more wavy, the horse has been sending out distress signals of stressors in his body—the dominos are falling before our eyes and we all go merrily on our way until Buddy comes in from the pasture limping and we cry, “What happened?” Missing all the red flags that lead up to the event. Drugs and chemicals affect the delicate balance of beneficial bacteria in the horse’s GI tract. These beneficial microorganisms exist in a “yin and yang” type scenario with parasites. As long as the horse’s immune system is up to par and everything is in balance, all is fine and everything stays within the confines of health.

So, what does poop have to do with all of this? What does poop have to do with laminitis or other maladies? Poop is also an indicator of our horse’s health. Remember, I learned this from Mrs. B. I still look at poop on the outside like she taught me, knowing which horse it belongs to and knowing if it is normal for that horse. And, I learned with a microscope and a FEC (Fecal Egg Count) kit, I can look into the microscopic environment of the poop and get a bigger picture of what’s in that unseen world. Or so I thought, for many years. I did them regularly for my herd, and for some of my clients. I taught many horse owners how to do them at clinics. Veterinary practices offer them and horse owners send them out one or two times each year for numbers. These numbers are divided into categories of Low, Medium and High Shedders with the bulk of the results coming from large and small strongyles (both egg types are essentially the same in the microscope), round worms and perhaps tape worms, though their eggs generally do not float well in the solution. Just about all FEC’s these days are done with the MacMaster slide method that has a grid pattern for counting on the slide. I used a slide with a slip over the drops of flotation fluid.

Fecal testing is really a very small part of the whole picture. The goal is to have a consistent FEC with no clinical symptoms for the horse as an individual. Each horse has their own threshold of balance that we need to respect. It helps us know when we should assist. There is no such thing as a worm free horse. I’m going to say that again- There is no such thing as a worm free horse, and that should never be the goal. The only way they can develop a resistance to parasites is to have them in proper balance with everything else. The number 1 defense against a parasite infestation is a healthy immune system. This can only be achieved with a proper diet that respects the physiology of the horse, freedom to move in an environment with herd mates with the majority of their life being lived as a HORSE.

Before I move on, one other important question that kept nagging at me with collecting samples is that most people grab a small portion of 1 poop ball to examine or send out. The digestive tract of the horse from the mouth to the end of the rectum on average is around 100 ft. which takes 36 to 72 hours to complete. I began to question making decisions and/or conclusions based on this perspective. A fragment of a sample taken from this complex immense system to determine a course of action?

The next most important item is manure management. If horses live, lay, eat or stand around in manure all the time, you have already lost the battle. With the health of their bodies as well as hoof health. At my barn we pick manure up along the Paddock Paradise track system 2 times a day and put it in small piles in places the horses have chosen as latrine spots. Two times a week we remove it from the environment. We spread it in farm fields adjacent to our property, and when we cannot spread it, we compost it for fertilizer in the pasture and the gardens in the spring. Composting manure generates heat, and the high heat will kill parasites, their eggs and larva, and you are left with a great fertilizer. As an added bonus, if you feed your horses the mineral supplements I recommend, what they do not utilize and poop out, helps put some trace minerals back in your fields, giving you a healthier pasture, and garden if you choose to use it there too.

Over the last few years, I have been attending online summits, lectures and reading books about the microbiome, mainly from the perspective of human health. However, in some of these Summits there were Veterinarians who talked about horses, dogs and cats. There is correlation because we are all considered mammals. Humans do suffer from parasites, but you probably don’t know anyone who has or who will admit to it.

One of the books that had a huge impact on me was, The Plant Paradox, by cardiologist, Dr. Steven Gundry. He talked about the microbiome in terms of your “gut buddies” as well as many other buddies that live on, around and within us as if we were like a planet. Approximately 90% of Us is non-human! Think about that for a moment! We have only begun to discover the diversity of the biome. I gained a whole new respect for my body, the ecosystem that makes me who I am and the symbiosis we share with the Earth and each other. If I help them survive and thrive, we both exist in harmony and balance. This is where true health emerges.

Let’s go back to conventional parasite management. Much of what I have done in the past has changed. I feel that instead of identifying and going after what we have named the “bad guys” (basically strongyles, round worms and tape worms) we need to realize that we have no “good guys” to compare them to when we do a fecal egg count. Right? We don’t even know who all of them are. They are countless. What we may have is an imbalance, but cannot really know unless we understand who and what they all are. To me that can only be logical. If we support the individual as a whole, the system will again return to harmony and balance without the use of drugs or costly interventions that are geared toward treating symptoms as opposed to the cause.

Chemical wormers are essentially a poison meant to kill something. What else is being affected? Gut health cannot be achieved with chemicals, but with a balanced immune system and a healthy horse. So, diet, stress management, herd mates- all these things are part of the whole picture. Deworming even with regular FEC’s is not only treating a problem that you may not even have, but will create parasite resistance to the drug and an unhealthy GI environment resulting in possible ulcers and the loss of immunity through loss of a diverse microbiome. Horses need to develop their resistance to parasites. If they are continually wiped out with a chemical, they will never have the opportunity to gain the resistance. Are we killing the good guys too? It is a plausible conclusion when you factor in the “opposites”. There may be times for its use, but never on a regular basis, and for a healthy horse almost never. You cannot deworm based on numbers alone, especially with only one test from a tiny sample. These are only small snapshots in time.

Another point I still find necessary to make is that the timing of when a FEC sample is taken. When we understand that the life cycle of parasites flows with the cycles of our Moon, it will guide us to better understand when to take a sample, if you chose to do that. Their population is generally at the lowest at new moon. Eggs hatch around the full moon. I have watched it in the microscope. As you can see, without knowing this you can get a different picture by indiscriminately taking samples. Many years ago, one of my clients gave a college student the opportunity to take FEC’s on her horse every week for a complete moon cycle. I think she wanted to prove me wrong, but the results turned out to show the cycle rise and fall from full moon, to new moon, to full moon.

I have been using herbal blends for my horses, and recommending them to my clients to support the gut and the diverse microbiome. Horses respond well to herbs being herbivores. Horses that have the opportunity will seek these plants out in their environment.

I have been recommending Just Thrive Spore based Probiotics as 100% arrive alive in the the small intestine. The product is for humans, however a 90 day bottle can be given to horses by opening 5 capsules in their feed daily until gone. I have had clients ask what to give their horses when they see them eating other horses poop. This is called coprophagic behavior. They do this to reestablish their microbiome. Just Thrive has stopped the behavior.

Also, horses in the wild, lose a considerable amount of weight during the winter. During this time it is understood that this cycle creates an internal environment that is not welcoming to parasites. So, they leave. Very few domesticated horses experience this cycle.

Lastly, we humans have lost living in balance with nature, our relationship with our food and the land it grows from. We have given away the knowledge of the circadian rhythm of our Mother Earth and all that we share this place with. We can only hear our Mother if we take the time to “BE” with her. The wisdom and connectedness we need to thrive is just beneath our feet. Let your bare feet touch the Earth and open your spirit to her wisdom.

Geri’s Substack

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