The fun with targeted fecal testing is that 80% of your horses aren’t a problem but 20% of them are high shedders.  It’s important to find out which ones are the problem and focus your de-worming efforts on them.

Case in point my most problem horse on the farm of course is my favorite, Cotton.  She has consistently run high on her fecal counts.  De-worming does work but she quickly picks up parasites again and sheds eggs like crazy which the rest of my herd has the potential of picking up.

So what to do?  I test Cotton more frequently to insure that my de-wormers I’m using are in fact working, I’m also forced to worm her more frequently but not the whole herd, just her.  I also work on managing my paddocks keeping them clean and rotate them so parasite load on the paddocks themselves diminishes.  I also feed off the ground with hanging hay nets hanging over rubber mats or if feeding her grain I feed in a hanging bucket vs. the ground rubber buckets.