Lexington, Ky. – Horse owners and hands-on care providers can now learn more about equine tapeworms and how to prevent the problems they cause in horses in a free special report available on TheHorse.com and sponsored by Pfizer Animal Health. Why should you care about tapeworms or oribatid mites? Because the former can threaten your horse’s life, and he acquires them by eating the latter.
To download the free PDF report, click here: “Tapeworms Uncovered” or visit TheHorse.com and look under Special Reports in the left-hand toolbar.
About Tapeworms:
Tapeworms can cause problems in two ways: They cause inflammation in the gut lining where they attach, and if large quantities of tapeworms are present, they can actually block passage of food through the GI tract. Tapeworms also have been linked in research to ileocecal intussusceptions (telescoping of the intestine into itself), ileal impaction colic, and spasmodic (gas) colic.
The only way to know if your horse has tapeworms and how bad the infection is would be to open him up and look. While we don’t want to do that with healthy horses, there have been post-mortem surveys conducted in various countries that looked at tapeworm populations in horses. Several have reported that 50-60% of horses examined were infected with tapeworms.
Small animal veterinarians learned that by keeping fleas off dogs and cats they could reduce (and nearly eliminate) the animals’ problems with tapeworms; that was a huge breakthrough in small animal care.
Unfortunately, the oribatid mite is the intermediate host for equine tapeworms, and it’s nearly impossible to keep oribatid mites away from horses (see the tapeworm life cycle in “Tapeworms Uncovered”).
There are 45,000 known species of oribatid mites. They are long-lived, taking from several months to two years to develop from egg to adult, depending on the species.
Oribatid mites have been studied quite a bit in the last decade around the world because of their importance in healthy forests, pastures, and soils. They are considered the “recyclers” of the ground because they break down organic materials that plants then can utilize for growth. What has been found in recent research is that the healthier the pasture and the environment, the more oribatid mites that can be found.
While having a large number of oribatid mites is a good thing for the fields, the more mites there are, the more opportunities your horses have to potentially ingest tapeworm-infected mites while grazing and, thus, complete the life cycle of the equine tapeworm. Some research has shown that hundreds of thousands of mites can live in one square meter (3.281 square feet) of soil. That’s a lot of exposure to oribatid mites, which, depending on the species of mite, could translate into a lot of exposure for horses to tapeworms.
Is that a problem? Only if your horses graze on good pastures, eat hay, or are bedded on straw or wood products. Therefore, it looks like breaking the life cycle for equine tapeworms (as can be done with dogs and cats) isn’t practical.
To learn more about equine tapeworms and how to prevent the problems they cause in your horse, read online or download the free PDF “Tapeworms Uncovered” brought to you by The Horse and sponsored by Pfizer Animal Health.
The Horse is published monthly by Blood-Horse Publications.
About Blood-Horse Publications:
Blood-Horse Publications is a multimedia publishing company that traces its roots to 1916. Its flagship publication,The Blood-Horse, is the leading weekly Thoroughbred racing and breeding news and information magazine. In addition, Blood-Horse Publications also publishes TBH MarketWatch, a newsletter for Thoroughbred investors and recipient of the prestigious Awards for Publication Excellence (APEX) for 2006 and 2005; the official Kentucky Derby and Breeders’ Cup souvenir magazine; Auction Edge; and Keeneland magazine. In addition, Blood-Horse Publications also publishes equine-related books and videos under the Eclipse Press banner, and operates a family of award-winning Web sites including BloodHorse.com, TheHorse.com, StallionRegister.com,ExclusivelyEquine.com, the official store of Blood-Horse Publications; and TrueNicks.com.
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