THE HORSE LISTENER
Sometimes you just don’t know what you don’t know CANDIDA BAKER recently discovered that wormers ain’t wormers, when it comes to those pesky little cyathostomes.
E
ighteen months ago I adopted a beautiful grey thoroughbred mare, Tyra, to come to my place with a few young ones in order to be their matriarch. A job, I must say, she did in a splendid fashion, keeping them in order, but kindly. I fell in love with her extremely gentle and loving nature, and very quickly decided that she’d found her forever home with me. When she arrived, the first thing I did was to worm her. I knew that she had been wormed regularly; I was careful about rotating wormers; she was coming onto a ten-acre
paddock with plenty of feed that had not been over-stocked, and she had good weight on her, so all in all, she was (and is) a very healthy large mare. However, I noticed as soon as she arrived that she had some grey-horse melanomas under her chin, and a few tell-tale bumps around her bum, and when Richard Gregory, from Mullumbimby Veterinary Clinic, my dentist and also my vet, came to do her teeth, he confirmed there were a few in her mouth. I also knew, having cared for several grey horses with them, that horses, as Richard says, are more likely to die with
them than because of them, so I wasn’t too concerned. She was also scouring a little when she arrived, and in the weeks after, but again, it was something that didn’t surprise me too much, I’d seen horses come from very dry areas arrive onto the lush green grass of the Northern Rivers, and take some months to adjust to the (usually) plentiful grass. I checked with Richard, and he suggested I should add a product such as Dynavyte or Fibre Protect into her feed as well, to help boost the probiotics in her gut, and I duly did that. Both products certainly helped, and I’m a fan of both of them for keeping horses really healthy – plus horses seem to truly love the taste of Fibre Protect. For a long time, the scouring was so minimal that it seemed that it was possibly just a case of an older horse, a different diet, and potentially internal melanomas, and since Tyra was obviously fit, happy and active, it didn’t occur to me that it could be another problem. But back in August, just when I was due to go on holidays for over a month, the scouring suddenly got worse. I brought forward my next worming because of being away, and mentioned to the people feeding her for me that if she was still scouring when I got back I would do something about it, and fit it in with her Hendra vaccination – particularly important in our area because of the amount of bats present flying over pasture.
