Horses and money – is it really either/or?

With the new financial year, and the recent bad weather, everyone involved in and working with horses is trying to make money go a bit further. Among other issues, the cost of medicines is rising every month (many drugs have seen their manufacturers put the price up 10 or 15% in the last few months), and feed bills are rising due to poor cereal harvests.

As a result, I’ve put together a list of “top tips” for saving money in the coming year.

Firstly, 5 things to do…

1) Make sure you worm smart – which doesn’t necessarily mean often! Many owners still worm religiously every 6-8 weeks; however, recent studies have shown about that 80% of the worms are in 20% of the horses. If your horse doesn’t have a high worm burden, it may be a waste of money pouring expensive wormers down him every other month. In addition, the more wormers we use, the higher the risk of worm resistance – there has been recognised round- or redworm resistance to every active ingredient available in the UK, so the less we use them, the longer they’ll be effective.

The way I like to recommend people go forward is to use Worm Egg Counts – your vet will be able to do these, or will have a lab they send them away to. The test simply takes a faeces sample and counts the worm eggs in it, giving you a good estimate of the number of worms in the horse. Remember, this test can only be done in the warmer months (the worms don’t lay eggs in the winter!), and it only tests for nematodes (round and redworms). To test for tapeworms, your vet will need to take a blood sample, but this usually only needs doing once or at most twice a year.

Depending on the test results, your vet will be able to advise you on the best worming strategy, and if you’ve got a low burden, it may not be necessary to worm at all, as long as your pasture management (poo-picking etc) is decent. I’ve seen horses wormed every month come back with such low counts that we stopped worming completely and, because they weren’t mixing with lots of other horses, they were still worm free a year later. That said, I’ve also seen horses that really do need that regular dose, so it does depend on the yard, the herd and the individual horse.